


Treatise on the Peregrine Phoenix, Book 1

by chimeraproblems



Series: Treatise on the Peregrine Phoenix [1]
Category: Caves of Qud (Video Game), Touhou Project
Genre: Alcohol, Animal Death, Body Horror, Cooking, Death, F/F, Food, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Gensokyo, Rough Intimacy, Slow Burn, Smoking, Suicidal Thoughts, does it count as major character death if it's mokou
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-14 19:01:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 25
Words: 41,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29051046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chimeraproblems/pseuds/chimeraproblems
Summary: A tale from the Caves of Qud with a generous seasoning of Touhou. Mokou is an indestructible immortal out for something like revenge. Agate Severance Star is a living legend who can't let her die. Together, using their senses, knowledge, taste, and fantastic cooking skills, they must cross Qud for a fated reunion while relearning the costs of eternity and legendary status.
Relationships: Agate Severance Star/Lulihart, Fujiwara no Mokou & Houraisan Kaguya, Fujiwara no Mokou/Agate Severance Star (Caves of Qud), Fujiwara no Mokou/Kamishirasawa Keine
Series: Treatise on the Peregrine Phoenix [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2131317
Comments: 20
Kudos: 34





	1. Desert Years

She walked the desert step by step. The sun leered its fever heat down upon her desiccated frame and bone-white hair. The night stole every trace of warmth. The furnace winds at dawn and dusk battered her with whirlwinds of poison salt and choked her through her tattered veil. The very ground bled her. She was a mote suspended in the cruel majesty, the grand indifference, the suffocating, trackless expanse of the great desert Moghra’yi.

She had entered the salt wastes with means to ease the crossing: rations, water, ammunition, a rifle, a fine pair of stolen boots. Moghra’yi devoured them all. Still it hungered. Now it ate time and the sense of it. How long since that final, solemn ration? How long since her last canteen ran dry? How many days since she cast off the empty rifle’s dead weight? How many steps since her soles fell to tatters? She could no longer say.

But Moghra’yi could not devour her purpose. Purpose drove her east. Her destination lay across the desert. Even when she stumbled, the thought of it lifted her again. Even as thirst wracked her throat and fever thundered in her mind, the goal pushed her forward. A core of burning will locked her to this dire trajectory. Locked her to the one she sought.

Willpower, no matter its ferocity, remained subject to cruel materiality. She fell at last. Purpose would not rouse her failing body. Moghra’yi revealed to her its final hunger, left unsated by countless nameless fools over its countless centuries.

She died.

The sun beat down. The wind scattered fitful salt-devils over the level waste. Her body was a splash of red and white in a vast empty canvas, her footprints two perforated lines of deep crimson trailing into the sunset. The sun dipped lower. Deep crimson faded to blackened brown as the desert fed upon the prints. Blackened brown crumbled into colorless ash.

She coughed. She braced a hand beneath her and pushed. She got up again.

A curse deeper than thirst and older than the desert had once more wrenched her back into life, or something like it. How many days before thirst or sun claimed this stretch of awareness? How many times would resurrection jealously pluck her from the sweet embrace of oblivion before she reached the land beyond the Moghra’yi?

“Pain in my fucking ass,” she muttered.

She strode on to the east, unblemished. It was a long way to Qud.


	2. Stewed Mushrooms in Brinestock

She woke elsewhere. It wasn’t the desert. It was cool and dark. There was something softly ticking nearby, and the idle rhythm gave shape to the surrounding chamber. Close walls with regular surfaces — a room. Under her, bedding on stone. From another room, something smelled  _ delicious. _

She opened her eyes. The walls around her were smoothed stone, hollowed out from sandstone and shaped into a bedroom. There was a torch somewhere outside the room — from the corner of her eye she caught its light flickering over the room’s ceiling. There was a thick-fibered knit blanket on her. As she roused, something changed in the rhythm of the nearby ticking.

She turned her head and looked to the center of the room. There was a metallic beetle roughly the size of a goat standing motionless on the patterned rug covering the room’s sandstone floor. Its bronze mandibles reminded her of a stag beetle’s complement. Torchlight gleamed from its grooved onyx shell and its insides ticked like clockwork. It had positioned itself squarely between her and the open doorway.

Her breathing quickened. Her body tensed.

It made no move to attack. After a moment, it cocked its head slightly, turned to the door, and plodded out into the hall with a whirring, mechanical gait. Its rhythm was spoiled by a hitching limp in one of its limbs. It rounded a corner and disappeared from sight.

She let out a breath and sat up. Her body was fresh. Her death must have been recent. She remembered walking. She remembered the empty horizon splitting in the east around an impossible chrome line. It gave her an unerring compass. Then, there had been the gleaming spires that swam up through the blinding, shimmering salt as if to join that line among the heavens. Finally, the bluff — the incongruous red bluff that rose up as if to shield her from glimpsing the bases of those persistent spires. She had hoped to reach it before the thirst claimed her again. She hadn’t. Someone must have found her before she came to.

She grew conscious of her own grime. The remains of salt-stained overalls and a tattered shirt still clung to her body. She’d died in them an uncertain number of times. There was a low octagonal table by the doorway with a pile of fresh clothes on it. She took the opportunity to change. Laid out for her was some sort of backless tunic as well as a pair of overalls with a drawstring waist. The fabric was soft and the cut was voluminous — they hung loose on her lanky frame. Whoever they belonged to was bigger than she was. She left her old rags on the floor.

The scent of aromatic spices lured her out of the room and down the hall, lagging along the path of the beetle. Her resurrections never sated her. The scent grew stronger as she passed several natural bends in the sandstone hallway. At last she emerged into a larger chamber, airy and cozy with several exits. A spacious kitchen filled the far half, while the closer half featured a long table and attendant stools. Along the closer walls, natural rock shelves had been smoothed into more potential seating. It seemed a space accustomed to group meals, yet it held only three beings at present. A short-furred hound lay by the room’s central hearth. The beetle stood in the kitchen, looking up attentively at the third occupant, who was cooking.

They were broad and fat and of no particular gender. They had a dark complexion and they kept their sunworn curls from spilling over their face with a patterned wrap. Their clothes were similar in style and size to the set she had borrowed, though they sported a stained apron over them. Folded at their back were a pair of wings, their grey-white feathers sporting a dappled iridescence. Faint nostalgia filtered through her at the sight of someone with wings. They turned from their dish in progress and saw her at the chamber’s threshold. Their expression widened in surprise.

“Didn’t expect to see you up yet, friend!” Their voice was deep and gentle. “Found you collapsed out in the desert. Name’s Irula. Welcome to my kitchen.”

Her voice nearly cracked as it cleared her dry throat. It had languished in Moghra’yi’s solitude.

“Mokou,” she said, for that was her name. “Fujiwara no Mokou.”

“Live and drink, Mokou,” said Irula. “Grub’s done soon. Have a seat. You must be thirsty. There’s water in the gourd.”

They nodded to a gourd, hollowed, dried and stoppered, resting on the table next to a pair of clay mugs. Mokou poured herself a mug of water and drank gratefully. What did it matter that she was freshly revived? She hadn’t drank anything in weeks. Every resurrection within Moghra’yi was just another death from thirst in a day or two — but not this one. Now she had water.

“Thanks,” said Mokou at last. “Thanks for finding me. What are you making?”

Irula’s tone shifted up and gained an air of critical assessment. “Well, it should get your feet back under you. I’ve been stewing up some pickled mushrooms and cucumbers in a bit of vinewafer stock. Thinking I might cut it with some yogurt, but, then again, might keep it on the side so you can add your own dollops as you like.”

“Oh, wow.” She’d had mirages about dishes like this ever since she burned through her rations. She’d never heard of vinewafers before, but they smelled just as good as every other scent wafting from the kitchen. “Can I help?”

Irula shot her a look of disbelief. “Sit. Won’t have you collapsing in my kitchen.”

Mokou sat. She took in more of the chamber’s details. They were still underground, but there was a steady airflow circulating through the chamber from its various entrances. The ceiling sported flues over the hearth and the kitchen’s stove, as well as several other ventilation tunnels around the room’s circumference, their mouths blackened with the passage of smoke over years. Her stomach growled, unsatisfied with water alone.

“You do this often?” asked Mokou. “Take in strangers from the desert, give ‘em water and food and clothes?”

“Happens a lot, on the edge of the Stilt,” answered Irula. Their tone now was warm, but with a hint of tease. “Lot of formidable breweries and canny vintners. Lot of first-time pilgrims lured in by the clamor and bustle who spend so much they forget to leave themselves enough water for the trek back home. They wander out, I find them. Gives me a chance to test out new recipes.”

They carried the stew in a steaming terrine to the table. The hound looked up as Irula passed, rose, and loped after them expectantly. The beetle followed behind with several bowls and a jar of yogurt balanced on its shell.

There was too much in Irula’s answer for Mokou to grasp while hunger held her in thrall. Any response died on her tongue as the winged chef ladled out a bowl and passed it to her. She tipped it to her mouth with such haste that she burned her tongue. The pain was nothing in the wash of flavor. It was savory and hearty. The broth was subtle enough that the tang from the pickled ingredients stood out all the more. She had downed half the bowl almost without realizing it.

“Easy there,” cautioned Irula, portioning out a bowl for the hound and a bowl for themself. “Don’t rush into it. You haven’t even tried it with the yogurt yet.”

Mokou paused just long enough to spoon in several dollops of yogurt, then resumed her frenzied pace. It seemed to be a goatsmilk yogurt — the complexity and funk of its palate meshed perfectly with the rest of the stew, while its coolness soothed her beleaguered tongue. Tears beaded at the corners of her eyes. How long had she gone without food in that dire crossing?

“Not quite there,” said Irula, after their own exploratory taste. They glanced over to gauge Mokou’s enjoyment and caught her tearful reaction. “Oh come now, Mokou. You only just drank my water, don’t go spilling it again.”

Mokou set down her empty bowl and caught her breath. “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” she croaked. “I need more.”

“There’s more than enough, but give it a minute. Just because you’re up and about doesn’t give you liberty to rush a good meal. Especially not for one who should be recovering.”

“I’m fine, I promise,” said Mokou. What did she need to recover? She was immortal. Already, her replenishing body wove the burn from her tongue. Still, it was sage advice. It gave her a moment to consider everything Irula had said now that their stew banished her gnawing hunger. Where was she, exactly? Still in the desert, certainly, given the dry air. The edge of the Stilt — what was the Stilt? Those spires? Then they hadn’t been a mirage. Furthermore, they had  _ alcohol _ there?

Was this Qud?

“Thank you, again. For the meal, and the water, and the clothes.”

“Don’t recall saying you could keep my clothes,” said Irula. After a moment, they chuckled. Fangs flashed briefly in their grin. “Happy to lend them, though. Yours were awfully raggedy when I found you. Haven’t seen a pilgrim as fleeced as you were in a good while. Couldn’t just let you leave the Stilt with such a bitter taste.”

It wasn’t the first time in Mokou’s life that someone with wings and fangs ambiguously speculated on her taste. Then again, that probably wasn’t what Irula meant. It didn’t feel like a threat. But there it was again — the Stilt.

“The Stilt?” asked Mokou.

Irula blinked. “The Six-Day Stilt? Holy city of the Mechanimists? Center of trade along the eastern bounds of the Moghra’yi? Thumping great cathedral right in the middle of it? Ringing any bells?”

“Is this Qud?”

“Aye,” said Irula, guardedly. “In a sense. You were baking out there a while, friend. You sure you’re fine?”

Mokou served herself another generous helping of stew and furnished it with several more spoonfuls of yogurt. “So,” she said, between more leisurely-paced bites. “We’re still in that fucking desert.”

Irula nodded. “Qud proper — that grand plateau with the jungles and rivers and canyons and whatnot — that’s a trek of about a week and a good hike on top of it. About four days to the edge of the Moghra’yi.”

“How much farther to the Moon Stair?”

The chef raised their eyebrows in silent consideration. “You’ve never heard of the Stilt, but you’ve heard of  _ that?” _

“I’m not from here,” said Mokou.

“Plenty of pilgrims aren’t,” said Irula. “Most all of them know better than to go the Moon Stair. So, friend Mokou, since you aren’t a lost lamb from the Stilt, where are you from that drives you there?”

It was hard to know how to answer that. Where she was from was so far gone it had no more context in this world for nearly anyone but her. What drove her to the Moon Stair was a rumor that hinted towards the one constant in her life. The only one who could share that distant context. She hadn’t seen her in far too long.

“I’m from all over and a long way away,” said Mokou. “I came in from the west. I heard there’s an old acquaintance of mine in the Moon Stair.”

“There’s only death in the west,” said Irula with a look of level concern.

Mokou winced. “Believe me, I know.”

“You set out to cross Moghra’yi alone for this old acquaintance?”

“Yeah. This has been by far the best night of the whole crossing.” She helped herself to a third bowl of stew, but took a smaller serving. Her previous servings were starting to catch up to her.

“And you ran out of water not four days from the desert’s edge.” Irula looked rueful. “Apologies, friend, but I couldn’t help but notice the state of your canteens. They’re safe filling in the drip-catch, but it’ll take a spell longer.”

“Ah,” said Mokou. She had run dry well before that point. All she could do from there was commit, and hope that the desert would end. Why did  _ she _ have to be across a blighted desert? How much should Mokou tell her host? “You didn’t have to do that. Do you — do you want help with dishes or anything?”

“You cross the damn Moghra’yi and then offer to clean my dishes? What are you  _ made _ of?” Irula waved off her offer. They made to stand and clear their own place. The hound slunk beneath the table and started sniffing towards Mokou’s bowl by way of her lap. Irula nodded to the beast’s attempt. “Mind Roq. You don’t want her muzzle there.”

“It’s fine, I can — augh.” The hound, Roq, dripped a substance from its mouth that sizzled on contact with the fabric of her borrowed pants. Mokou propelled herself backwards in her stool to shy from Roq’s attention. Closer inspection revealed pitted discolorations across the fabric from older attempts. “Irula, your dog has acid slobber.”

“She’s a hyrkhound!” Irula laughed, deep and rich, as they moved from the table back to the kitchen. “And she’s not my dog. She’s my bodyguard. So’s Atargysis. Hope it didn’t give you a scare.” They indicated the clockwork beetle. After ferrying the dishes it had stood motionless by the hearth for the remainder of the meal.

“Acid slobber is, uh, normal for her breed?” Mokou stood to expose less surface area to the insistent Roq and to finish her last serving out of the hyrkhound’s reach.

Irula nodded. “You’ve never been to Qud before, I take it?”

“First time here,” confirmed Mokou. Her meal complete, she joined Irula in the kitchen. It was orderly, clean, and stocked with a wide variety of culinary tools, some familiar, some foreign.

“Well, friend Mokou, then all there is for you in the east is death. It’s three months on foot from here to the Moon Stair through the roughest terrain and nastiest surprises that porous chrome-choked deathtrap can hurl at you. Then, assuming you make it there, you’ve got another problem. The problem is: you’re in the Moon Stair.”

“Then I’ll fly,” said Mokou.

“Quicker, sure, until some half-rusted turret decides that new pip in the wide-open sky looks like target practice. Or an angry tree clobbers you out of the sky. Or, Bel shield you, you hit a flock of dawngliders. Stop trying to help me with dishes. You should be laid up with heatstroke.” The chef plucked the empty bowl from Mokou’s grasp and busied themself in the washbasin with the others.

“Look,” Mokou sighed. “That kind of thing can’t stop me. I don’t know what dawngliders are but I can assure you that they really can’t stop me.”

“Fire-breathing winged snakes,” said Irula.

“That sounds horrible. Why do you have those?”

“A surfeit of warm rocks, presumably.”

Mokou shook her head. “Regardless. That can’t stop me. How can I pay you back for dinner?”

The chef sighed heavily. “You can tell me what you thought about it.”

“Um.” She felt supremely satisfied, though she’d almost certainly overindulged. She considered the meal as a whole. “The yogurt really tied it all together. I don’t think it would have done that if you had stewed it in with the rest of it. It needed that little bit of separation to really cohere.”

Irula set aside the dish they’d just cleaned and paused to consider the assessment. “Fair bit of praise. You really liked it.”

“I liked how much of it there was. I haven’t eaten anything in…” She couldn’t remember. How long had she walked the desert? “... I don’t remember.”

Irula’s expression sank into chagrin. “How are you alive, Mokou?”

Mokou shrugged. With nothing to occupy her hands, she stuck them in the spacious pockets of her borrowed overalls. “Can’t really die,” she said at last. “Drank something I shouldn’t have. Long story.”

Irula wiped off their hands on the fabric of their apron. “You’re going back out there no matter what I tell you, aren’t you?”

Mokou nodded.

The chef sighed and stepped away from the wash basin. “Rest of the dishes are yours. Here’s how you pay me back, okay? You rest up. An old acquaintance of mine is coming by in a few days. She knows Qud. She can ease your journey. Wait for her.”

“That’s all you want me to do?”

“No, no,” said Irula. They grinned, wide and sharp. “You’re gonna help me workshop  _ so _ many dishes.”


	3. Perch

In the lee of the bluff’s ridgeline was a cluster of moisture condensers sheltered from the harsh desert winds. Mokou had found it to be a good perch, so she perched there in the twilight and smoked. Lazy coils of light-eating smoke drifted from her cigarette, hand-rolled from some unfamiliar petals she’d found in Irula’s pantries. The lights of the distant Stilt glittered between every opaque coil that rose before her eyes.

The sound of sandals on sandstone grit drew closer behind her.

“How’re the condensers?” came Irula’s voice.

Mokou turned and shrugged. “Condensing, probably. I don’t really know what to look for.”

The chef chuckled softly. They cast an appraising eye over the subtly humming machines as they drew level to Mokou’s perch. “They seem fine to me. Usually noisier when they start failing.”

“Well, that’s good,” said Mokou. “Wouldn’t know how to start fixing them, either.”

“Wouldn’t expect you to know,” said Irula, softly bemused. They took in a few deep breaths of the night air. “See you found the vantabud.”

“This?” asked Mokou, lifting her cigarette. “Smelled nice. What is it?”

“It’s an herb from the deeps. Sucks in light like a salt-parched pilgrim downs water. Think that particular batch comes from the village of Sumor, out east. Big bubbles of darkness shroud their fields. Nice place to beat the heat. So I’m told, at least. Never been myself.”

“I believe it,” said Mokou.

“Makes you a bit more… slippery when you spice a dish with it. Not sure what it does when you smoke it.” Irula cast a sidelong glance at Mokou. “You make a habit of smoking things you’ve never seen before?”

“I’ll try anything twice,” Mokou laughed and took a drag. “Hasn’t caught up to me yet, as a habit. Though I think I get what you mean by slippery.”

The two sat in silence for a time, looking out across the salt pans to the Stilt.

“You come up here just to check on the condensers?” asked Mokou.

“Came up to check on you,” answered Irula. “I know when someone’s set on leaving. Appreciate you waiting like I asked. Been nice having the company.”

It was strange to have someone so bluntly concerned with her wellbeing. Even before the desert, Mokou knew, she’d fallen into a cycle in her life where that sort of concern was a rarity. An eon, even. She’d fallen away from the world and its folk. “I appreciate the hospitality,” she said. “Makes me feel like a person again. Hard to be a person in the desert.”

Irula grunted in acknowledgment. “You were out there a while.”

Mokou nodded. “It was bad. I’ll take a reprieve while I can.”

It was probably best to leave it as an understatement. She didn’t want the chef’s compassion to twist into pity. It was hard enough not to drive herself back out into the wastes.

“You should visit the Stilt while you’re here,” said Irula, after a spell.

“What’s it like?”

“No place like it,” Irula replied. “Every light you see there is a story. Maybe it’s a grenadier’s oil lantern, maybe a preacher’s bonfire, maybe a pariah’s cook-hearth, maybe the braziers of the grand cathedral itself. No way of knowing until you’re in it, gleaning those stories for yourself.”

She’d seen her share of cities over the millennia. Still, her curiosity was piqued. She gestured with her cigarette to a single light bobbing along the dark pans below. It had left the throng of the city and worked its way closer over the course of the last half hour. “What about that one?”

Irula chuckled. “Unless I miss my guess, that’s my old acquaintance. You want her story? You ask her yourself. Come on, let’s greet her.”


	4. Phoenix Tail

Mokou had little idea what to expect from this acquaintance. Then again, perhaps nothing could have prepared her to take in the figure approaching through the darkness. The first detail she noted was that the approaching light was in fact two: one, a lantern dangling from the underbelly of a hovering platform; the other, some sort of luminous growth covering half of the newcomer’s face and sweeping up one of her formidable antlers. Her hair was short, swept up and back, and dyed a vibrant purple. Short fur framed her sharp-featured face, and her nose was cervine in nature. She wore a grey jacket of artificial materials, strategically reinforced and insulated against the Moghra’yi’s frigid nights. Beneath it she had layered a crisp button-up with a high, stiff collar, seemingly untouched by the desert passage. Beneath that, she wore nothing, for her lower body was quadrupedal and fashioned like that of a deer. She was armed with a blade and an energy pistol, sheathed and holstered at her front hips. She looked far more prepared than Mokou was and she carried herself with a poise and severity that Mokou found subtly irritating.

It was almost a perfection. Almost like  _ her. _

“That’s her,” said Irula, pitched softly to Mokou. “Agate Severance Star.”

“What is she?” asked Mokou. The newcomer was still a ways off in her approach.

“Many things,” replied Irula. “Tinker. Author. Scientist. Chef. Bester of the Heptagon.”

“No, I mean like—” Mokou made a vague sort of grasping gesture as if to shape out her ignorance with both hands. There was an old word she sought for. “Your friend. What  _ is _ she? Some kind of deer youkai?”

“Some kind of  _ what?” _ asked Irula. “Her kind are the hindren. Not surprised you haven’t heard of them.”

Agate Severance Star drew up to the surface entrance of Irula’s subterranean kitchen where the two awaited her, sheltered from the night.

“Chef,” nodded Irula in greeting.

“Chef,” Agate responded in kind.

Her piercing gaze swept over Mokou for a moment. It left the immortal feeling self-conscious. Mokou’s hair was in a cumbersome way again — nearly down to her ankles and Irula hadn’t any spare brushes to sacrifice for her. She wore the same too-large set of borrowed clothes she’d worn for the last few days. Fresh water was too dear here for cleaning clothes. There was barely enough to scrub some of the desert’s grime from her, and still she felt salt on her skin. She’d mustered better first impressions over the course of her long existence.

Agate turned back to Irula. “I see you’re still taking in every thirsty fool you find out here.”

Mokou flushed in anger but Irula responded with a grin. “Hope I never stop. Knock the salt from your hooves and come in.”

Agate did so and swept inside without any further regard towards Mokou. The lanterned platform trailing the hindren dipped lower to fit through the entryway, giving Mokou a glance of its contents: sacks, scrap, gadgetry, batteries, canteens, bewildering miscellany. Irula gave the immortal a conciliatory look and followed Agate inside.

“It’s the leg again, isn’t it?” Agate’s voice echoed back along the tunnel. There was a sharpness and clarity to her tone. It was a clear counterpoint to Irula’s deep and soft voice.

“Aye,” said Irula.

“A compounding error, I’m certain.”

“Wouldn’t doubt that. Been troubling the poor thing for nearly a fortnight.”

“I came as my schedule allowed,” said Agate. She sounded almost apologetic, like a brackish pool was almost potable. “Atargysis!”

It seemed they were talking about the beetle. Mokou, last in the train, arrived in the common chamber to find Atargysis standing in motionless readiness before Agate. The hindren tinker had already fished several toolkits from her pack-sled and presently donned a pair of slim black gloves modified with extra mechanical digits. Withdrawing some sort of specialized implement, she levered it into a seam in Atargysis’ shell and delicately removed an entire onyx elytron from the beetle’s back. Beneath it were several tiers of dizzying clockwork innards. Agate fixed a telescoping monocle over the half of her face unobstructed by the growth. The growth — was it some sort of fungus?

“What are you doing?” asked Mokou.

The critical gaze of Agate Severance Star remained fixed upon the beetle’s exposed workings. “I am isolating the fault in Atargysis’ walk cycle and I will not be interrupted again. Am I understood?”

“Mokou,” said Irula, from the stove. “Come help with supper.”

“Sure,” said Mokou, raising her hands in exasperation as she backed away. “What are we making?”

Irula set several starchy tubers on a cutting board. “Peel those dreadroots and cut them into discs. We’re making casserole.”

“Can do.” Mokou took up a knife and set herself to the task. Next to her, Irula shucked the scales from several fresh serpentine tails and hung them over a saucepan to catch the blood as it drained. “Your friend. How’d you meet her?”

“She showed up a few years back for a geological survey. She’s got a theory this bluff here was thrust up out of the pans from some ancient impact. She usually drops by any time she’s in the neighborhood of the Stilt. Always an honor to have her.”

“Why is she like that?” asked Mokou.

Agate’s voice cut over the sounds of the kitchen. “Why do you have so much hair? Do you want to die? Are you a hermit?” She spoke without looking up from her task. “How do these questions make you feel?”

“Is there another way she should be?” asked Irula, bemused.

In order, Mokou thought:  _ apathy, fervently, no, angry and homesick, and maybe not, but she didn’t have to like it. _ She scowled but held her tongue. She had grown accustomed to the easy atmosphere of Irula’s kitchen over the last few days. Now this interloper disrupted that atmosphere. But then, “interloper” wasn’t quite right — Irula knew this Agate Severance Star, valued her, respected her. If anyone was an interloper here, it was Mokou.  _ This _ was who Irula thought would  _ ease _ Mokou’s journey to the Moon Stair?

There was little further conversation. Agate continued her repairs in silence. Mokou brooded her way through the meal’s preparation. Irula issued quiet commands and directives — more than usual. This was not an experiment, as other meals had been. This was Irula cooking with a vision. Were they trying to  _ impress _ Agate? What was the point in that?

“That should do it,” said Irula, with a quiet satisfaction. “Now to bake.”

“You need anything else?” asked Mokou. Something else in the chef’s tone told her the answer was no, but while she was working she had less time for brooding. Irula shook their head and cranked the dial on an old kitchen timer. Mokou wiped off her hands and ambled out of the kitchen to settle on a stool.

There was little else to do but watch the hindren work. Frustrating as it was to admit, Agate had skill. Not only that, but a tremendous technical aptitude and an uncanny amount of fine motor control.

“I have already extracted several of your hairs from Atargysis’ inner workings,” said Agate, after roughly a minute of Mokou’s silent attention. Again, she spoke without diverting her gaze from the task at hand. “How they ended up inside the creature shall undoubtedly remain a mystery to science. Perhaps they phased their way in.”

“It had the bad leg when I got here,” said Mokou.

“Then you have shucked enough blame to avoid an extra service fee. Congratulations are in order.”

“I don’t have money anyway,” said Mokou.

“This is self-evident. Surely, you must have renounced such material things for your hermit’s creed.”

“I’m not a hermit,” Mokou sighed. Not technically, though she’d known a few as friends and rivals. Those memories brought a stabbing pang of loss. None of them had made it. She didn’t want to dwell on it. She was here for the one woman she hadn’t lost. “Wait, do you even have money here?”

Agate lifted her piercing gaze from her model of a specific clockwork assemblage to train it on Mokou. In her regard was a flood of withering scorn held back by a thin sheen of utter disregard. “You are asking me for a basic primer on Qud’s systems of commodity exchange. Reconsider this.”

Mokou lifted her hands placatively and leaned away. She looked back into the kitchen. “Irula, does Qud have money?”

“It’s water,” answered Irula.

“Oh,” said Mokou. “That’s grim.”

“Merchant’s Guild, the Consortium, and the dromads keep it so certain goods have a guaranteed water value in case you ever find your skins dry and your pockets full of copper. Beyond that, it’s all haggling.”

A sinking weight built in her gut. “Guess I’m in your debt, then.”

Irula snorted. “Fuck debt. A body needs water.”

“Chef puff on debt,” Agate muttered to herself, seemingly for her own amusement.

“I appreciate it,” said Mokou. She’d run out on her share of debts before and repaid far fewer. The fact that Irula refused to hold it over her made her feel all the more determined to repay their kindness — somehow, someday.

As long as they didn’t expect her to be  _ friends _ with Agate.

The kitchen timer ran its course. Irula grunted and stood to retrieve the casserole from the oven. “Time to plate,” they said.

“Oh, we’re plating now?” asked Mokou, with a hint of incredulity.

Irula replied with a sharp grin. “Nothing wrong with looking as good as you taste.”

The casserole looked  _ very _ good. Each cross-section revealed strata of baked dreadroot interlaced with savory tail meat. Most of the rich sauce baked in to saturate the inner layers, while Irula drizzled delicate spirals atop each slice with the remainder.

“One for you and one for our guest,” said Irula, handing Mokou two plates to carry to the common area.

“Grub’s done,” Mokou announced. Agate still seemed engrossed in the repairs. Her tools lay strewn across the dining table.

“Thank you, I gathered,” replied Agate. She nodded to a spare bit of table still uncluttered. “You can leave it here.”

Mokou stopped in her tracks. She had no more will to bite back her anger. “Show some respect for the meal! Clear off some of this crap so we can eat while it’s still hot!”

Agate turned once more to fix her with a cold stare. The tinker raised an eyebrow — perhaps both eyebrows; the fungal growth obscured one of them. Something shifted in her regard. “That was far too sensible a sentiment for a hermit. Very well. My apologies to the chef.”

“Still not a hermit,” Mokou grunted. She hadn’t expected Agate to give any sort of ground.

“Maybe she’s a mysterious stranger,” offered Irula. “How would we know?”

Agate stowed her tools nearly as quickly as she’d unpacked them in the first place. In short order, the table had enough space for the three of them to dine. The meal dispelled the remainder of Mokou’s bad mood. It was savory, rich, spicy and tender. It lived up to every promise made by its plating. As it settled within her, she felt almost insulated — like there was a protective layer of gentle foam between her psyche and the dire thoughts that were her nigh-constant companions. It was remarkable what baked starches could do.

“Quite good,” said Agate. Mokou was not so lost in the reverie of casseroles as to miss Irula beaming at the compliment. After a few more bites, Agate continued her assessment. “Mental fortitude and… fire resistance, yes?”

“Aye,” nodded Irula, still grinning. “No frills. Kept it functional for peace of mind.”

“Comfort food, certainly,” said Agate. “Very economic use of dawnglider. Another one for the cookbook, I say. Does it have a name?”

“Not yet,” said Irula. “Mokou, ideas?”

Mokou paused halfway through a bite. “What, me?”

“Sure. You helped. Got a name for this dish?”

Mokou swallowed. “Kinda putting me on the spot here. This is dawnglider meat?”

Irula nodded. “Used the blood as a base for the sauce, too.”

“Kinda reminds me of chicken. Y’all have chickens out here?”

Irula shrugged. Agate narrowed her eyes in an expression of curious reassessment, but shook her head.

“Damn,” said Mokou. “I miss chicken.” She took a few breaths to mitigate the mounting level of spiciness. “What if you call it something like… ‘Baked Phoenix Tail’?”

“Hmm,” Irula weighed the suggestion.

“You’re really letting her name it?” asked Agate. “She’s making up words. Are we sure she’s not a hermit after all?”

“Mokou came in from the west. Maybe there’s chicken across Moghra’yi. Or phoenix.”

“There isn’t. Believe me, I was looking,” sighed Mokou.

“You crossed the Great Salt Desert?” asked Agate, her voice tinged with both interest and disbelief. “Whatever for?”

“It was in my way,” said Mokou. “Gotta get to the Moon Stair.”

Agate laughed for half a minute of wordless derision. When she found words once more, they sustained the tone. “With what, borrowed clothes and borrowed water? You fool. You really do want to die.”

“You sure your friend’s in the Moon Stair?” asked Irula.

“Never said she was my friend,” said Mokou.

How could a single word possibly encompass everything Houraisan Kaguya was to her? To call her a friend, a rival, a lover, an enemy, a partner, a nemesis, to call her anything was to fix their relation to a single point. Certainly it had turned on any one of those points many times, but a single point could never withstand their eternal gyre. They were antipodes. To shift closer was to change the balance. To change the balance was to spin the axis to pieces. There had been so many axes now, so many pieces. How much could she tell them?

What had Kaguya built for herself here?

Mokou sighed. “I was poking around a scribe’s workshop back across the desert. Found a flyer, or part of one. It said, ‘Seek the eastern horizon to find the House of Eternity.’ Then there was something about the Moon Stair.”

“Sounds more like poetry than an advertisement,” said Agate.

“You still have that flyer?” asked Irula.

“Well, I  _ had _ it. That scribe didn’t really want to part with it. She wanted to study the calligraphy. Might’ve stolen it.” Mokou winced. “Might’ve eaten it when I ran out of food.”

Agate scoffed. “You crossed Moghra’yi and now fix yourself towards certain death for the sake of a scrap of paper? That you  _ ate?” _

“First off, it was vellum,” said Mokou.

“Oh, that changes everything,” said Agate.

“Second off, you don’t get it. The House of Eternity — back where I come from, that was where she lived. She — Kaguya, she…” How could she put her goal to words? “I need to see her. It’s the best lead I’ve found.”

“I’ve never heard of such a place,” said Agate, though for once it was not said out of derision.

“Me either,” Irula shrugged. All three had finished the evening’s meal, though there was still a bit of fat to chew.

“It sounds like the sort of grandiose title that any strain of petty warlord or water baron bestows upon their holding,” Agate continued. “Then again, if they’ve established a freehold in the Moon Stair, perhaps such self-importance is warranted.”

“If it’s her, it is,” said Mokou.

“What are your plans, chef?” asked Irula. “After you fix my bodyguard.”

“I would like to stay here for a time,” replied Agate. Already she began to unpack her tools to continue her repairs upon Atargysis. “I plan to pen a polemic to correct the woeful state of Stilt cuisine. What I saw there galled me. They have grown complacent.”

“Hmm,” said Irula. “Mokou. Let’s clean up. Give her space to work.”

“No dessert?” asked Mokou, standing with the chef to clear the empty plates.

“Still hungry?” Irula grinned with a flash of fangs. “There’s always seconds of Chef Irula’s Baked Phoenix Tail.”


	5. Blood from Stone

Irula led Mokou along another corridor until they emerged in a small chamber stocked with amphorae, bottles, and sacks of dry goods. It was cooler down here. On the far wall was a drip-spout fed by the condensers somewhere above them. It drained into a catch basin. Balanced in that basin was one of Mokou’s battered canteens. The other rested on a shelf nearby.

“Hundred and twenty-eight drams,” said Irula. They pulled the canteen from the basin, capped it, and passed it to Mokou. “Travel true and it’s more than enough to get you where you’re going.”

The heft of her full canteens was primally satisfying. She looked from them to the chef and made to speak. Irula held up a hand.

“You want to repay me. I know. Just don’t spend it all in one place, and tell folk about my kitchen. I get by on word of mouth.”

“Thank you,” said Mokou. “I’ll try to be careful with it. Don’t want to run out again.”

“You ever do, it ain’t the end of the world. Lot of folk in Qud keep a little more than they need — especially dromads. They’ll part with it for the right sort of goods. Most everyone likes daggers. Can do a lot of things with a dagger.”

Mokou slung her canteens over her shoulder and looked around the storeroom. It was hard to look at Irula in the face of their compassion. “Guess there’s nothing holding me here.”

“Won’t stop you, but you’re welcome to stay the night again. Agate can get you there.”

“Will she, though? Sounds like she has other plans.”

“She ain’t as rigid as you might think.” Irula rubbed their jaw, then sat back on the covered lid of a squat amphora. “Agate… Agate’s a legend.”

“Legendary asshole, maybe,” Mokou scoffed. She folded her arms and leaned back against an empty stretch of cavern wall.

Irula chuckled softly. “I mean she moves in certain circles, attracts a certain company. I mean, technically I’m a legend myself.”

“No shit?” said Mokou. She still wasn’t quite certain what the chef meant by legendary, but she’d believe it after some of the meals they’d whipped up.

“Merchant’s Guild certified,” nodded Irula. “But Qud’s full of ‘em. There are legends, and there are _legends._ Agate Severance Star is a _legend._ Sure, she doesn’t know your House of Eternity. Reckon she knows someone who does, though.”

“I appreciate it, I do,” said Mokou. “But I’ve known her for three hours and I think I’d rather just go out there and die.”

She glanced back to see Irula’s reaction and instantly regretted saying it. It was only partially a joke. It wasn’t even that she sought out death — she could tell herself that, at least. It was only that death, when it came, was an inconvenience. An itch that wouldn’t stay scratched. A reprieve, even, as it was in the desert. As it was many times before. It was not a perspective she could expect others to share. Not even Kaguya.

She never knew what Kaguya got out of it.

“Look, I — I’ll stay the night,” Mokou said. “Few hours won’t make a difference. But I don’t think the deer lady’s gonna go for it.”

“You leave her to me,” said Irula. “Mokou, here’s where I’m at. I love hosting folks. Love the company. It’s an honor, personally, professionally, to host her. I like her visits—” They lifted their wrap to run a hand back through their curls. “When they’re _brief._ If I have to host her for however long it takes her to write another book, I will lose it. Probably try to eat her.”

Mokou laughed harder than she’d laughed in recent memory. It felt like rust flaking loose. It was a shame this kitchen couldn’t hold her.

“You want to pay me back?” the chef continued. “Let her go with you.”

Mokou’s laughter subsided gradually. She still found herself grinning. “Alright, alright. I can take her off your hands.”

“Alright, alright. I can take her off your hands.”

“Ain’t just that. I’ll rest easier knowing she’s guiding you.”

“It’s that bad out there, huh?” Mokou scratched the back of her head.

“Anything can happen.”


	6. Hearthfire

_ In the past, _ wrote Agate Severance Star,  _ I have been generous with my culinary techniques to those who have come to study with me. I have instructed them to be generous in kind, for the proliferation of my methods can only improve the ambient quality of cuisine in Qud. I fear this generosity has soured on the watervine. _

She paused to stretch her hand and marshal her thoughts. She sipped mulled cider and watched the sludge of spices settle back along the bottom of the mug.

_ Perhaps, _ she continued,  _ my pupils lack my character judgment, or failed to instill in their own pupils the rigor necessary to properly implement my methodology. Perhaps this is why every kitchen in the Stilt seems to have now exuded, in the manner of a jell’s dubious pseudopod, some calamitous oaf freshly graduated from scraping together twigs and epoxy for repast who nonetheless trots out my name as a shield. If one were to compare the dishes of these Stilt chefs to dirt, one would grossly defame the merits of a freshly-turned hillside of salt-rich loam. _

Atargysis, restored to its shelled dignity and full mobility, gazed at her with its blown-glass eyes. Once more, it plodded forward and pressed its head against the closest leg in a silent search for pets. Once more, she placed a hoof upon its head and pushed it gently but firmly away. The attempts came at precise intervals. This was an encouraging diagnostic indicator.

_ This speculation obscures the ultimate responsibility. I have clearly allowed this idolatry to run unchecked for too long. Once more it falls to me to grasp the saucepan of culinary zeitgeist with a corrective hand. To sear my name from the lips of the unworthy. To advance kitchen consciousness and to instill within it the necessary rigor for my techniques. Woe to you and your collapsing flans if you continue to invoke my name in your ignorance. _

Irula sat down across the table from her with a cider of their own. “What do you make of Mokou?” they asked.

Agate rested her hand once more and set aside the pen. “The death-bound fool? I had forgotten her name, thank you.”

“Think that’s a bit uncharitable,” said Irula.

“Did I name myself Agate Charity Star? I did not.”

Irula swirled their cider as they weighed their next statement. “She says she can’t die.”

“That tends to be a self-correcting belief,” said Agate. “I see no need to adjust my assessment.”

“You didn’t pick her up out there,” said Irula. “No food, no water, clothes in tatters. Not a scratch on her.”

“Suspicious, but still explicable outside of immortality.” Agate sniffed. “She could be one of those hyperactive regenerators. This is simple enough to test, you know.”

“Not in my kitchen,” Irula growled.

“Yes, yes,” said Agate. “It would assuredly be a waste of effort. She’ll have every opportunity to test it herself from here to the Moon Stair.”

“You don’t want to see for yourself?”

Agate sighed and pressed her fingers to her temples. The pressure soothed the itches that built beneath her glowcrust at the tail end of long days. It was late. She’d hoped to make more progress on her polemic, but conversation rendered that impossible.

“No, I don’t care to interrupt myself for the sake of one woman’s delusions.”

“The polemic can wait,” said Irula. Clearly the chef wanted her to play nursemaid. How could she write with Irula’s heart bleeding across her efforts?

“Those people out there,” said Agate, gesturing sharply to the entrance and the distant Stilt, “—are talking about me like they  _ know _ me. I cannot allow such a gross distortion of kitchen consciousness to remain unrectified.”

“Agate,” said Irula. “Fools will always talk. You haven’t seen her cook. I have. She’s got fundamentals like I’ve never seen. Maybe she doesn’t know our ingredients. She’s not from here. She learns quick.”

“Are you suggesting I take on another pupil?” She bit back a scoff. That was the cause of her current trouble.

Irula leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I’m saying once she gets her bearings you might be learning from  _ her. _ I’m saying I can’t keep her here and if you let her die out there then you’re the fool.”

Changing plans had always been agonizing. The fire was within her already — she needed time and proximity to refine it, direct it, to thrust it into the world and right its course. What would come of that fire should she be pulled away too soon? “Irula,” she said, “I don’t want to go to the Moon Stair. I want to write my polemic.”

“How many times you been?” asked Irula.

“Enough times,” said Agate.

“Then at least see her to the Heptagon. They’d appreciate her.” Irula gave an encouraging look. “Lot of room to write there.”

“The proximity is key,” said Agate. “You would have me observe from a week behind and correct from two.”

“You think they’ll stop being fools in two weeks? Three? You gonna waste your time on that while real talent slips away?”

It was not merely Agate’s name on the line. Those wayward chefs impugned the names of any who championed Stilt cuisine. One, in particular — if this were a matter that could be corrected from Kitchen Heptagon, then doubtless Jathiss, the Carbide Chef Six-Day Stilt, would have already done so. She had not.

Agate sighed again. She had finished her nightcap, sludge and all. “This talent — you really believe her?”

Irula shrugged. “Got no reason not to. Say she’s lying, then a liar makes it to the Heptagon. Doesn’t change her talent. Say she isn’t, though. Say she really can’t die. Sounds to me like a scientific conundrum.”

Irula really was trying to get her invested. Perhaps they could stand to foster a healthier sense of skepticism. Still, she trusted their judgement in the culinary realm. This insistence was its own endorsement.

“You’ve always been credulous.” Agate flickered a smile.

“Be my next cookbook,” Irula grinned. “Chef Irula’s Credulous Meals.”

“‘You’ll believe them,’” said Agate, tracing out an arc between her fingers.

The two of them chuckled. The hearth crackled dimly and steadily. Roq, the hyrkhound, whuffed in her sleep. Irula rolled their empty mug between their palms. Agate shuffled her manuscript back into a bit of oilskin.

“She’s hurt.” Irula broke the silence. “Didn’t pry. Didn’t need to, it’s in everything she does.”

“We all have our wounds,” said Agate. “This is a wounding land.”

“Get the feeling her wounds ain’t from here either,” said Irula. They looked into the hearth’s flickering light. “Think I’d like to see how she cooks when she isn’t hurting.”

“How much water did you give her?” Agate asked.

“Two full canteens,” said Irula.

Agate’s mouth twisted in a faint grimace. They always gave too much of themself. “You’re pouring good water into brine.”

“Only one way to stave that off,” said Irula. “Would you go with her?”

Agate sighed and stood from the table. She made for the corridor to the guest quarters, but paused at the threshold.

“If it liberates you from your relentless sentimentality,” she said, “I’ll go.”


	7. Hoarshroom Freezepuffs

“One for the road,” said Irula. They held a tray of flaky puffed pastries that steamed in the shallows before sunrise. Mokou accepted one with gratitude and suppressed a shiver. The chill of night hadn’t yet receded and all she had to stave it off were clothes borrowed from Irula and a blanket borrowed from Agate. A hot pastry was just the thing to warm her hands.

Inside was a savory filling of sauteed mushrooms and crisp vinewafers. Some of the mushrooms seemed to be glowing.

“Now, I’ve eaten a lot of weird mushrooms,” said Mokou, “so I want to check: is it okay that these are glowing?”

“The hoarshrooms?” asked Irula. “S’what they do. Wanted to give you something to keep you cool out there once the sun’s on you.”

“Okay, cool,” said Mokou, continuing to eat. “Really good. My organs are glowing?”

A luminous teal glow seeped gently through the fabric of Mokou’s borrowed tunic. Her organs were glowing.

“It’s what they do,” said Agate, halfway through a pastry of her own. Light spilled through her dappled sides. It bore the same hue as Mokou’s glow, the glow of the mushrooms themselves, and — Mokou just now noticed — the glow of the fungal outcropping that colonized half of the hindren’s face and an entire antler.

Mokou finished the rest of her pastry, then pointed at Agate’s face. “Hey, is that—”

“No,” Agate said with a smile of self-satisfied intensity. “Mine isn’t ripe yet.”

“This batch is from Bethesda Susa,” said Irula. “Probably not from anybody you know. The glow’ll wear off in an hour or two.”

“Huh,” said Mokou. Already she felt less afflicted by the dawn’s chill. She knew how it felt to succumb to the cold, how it felt to sink into that creeping, seductive acceptance. The cold was yet another of Moghra’yi’s hungers, and one she fell prey to several times in the crossing. They had almost been nostalgic, those deaths. Before the desert, well before, cold was her constant suitor. There had been a long age of ice. Nearly two millennia ago, it had finally relented and the world awoke once more. But here and now, poised on Irula’s doorstep, this mushroom pastry did not feel at all like death. It felt like acclimation. “Anything else I should know about hoarshrooms?”

“If you cook them right, you can do this.” Agate turned, took in a deep breath, and loosed it as a cone of frost that roiled and glittered across the empty, shadowed pans.

“Huh!” said Mokou. She tried it herself. The blast of frost was bracing on her tongue and throat. Like shaved ice in summer — a memory, a sensation, from long ago, when there was summer. The tingling faded, but faint crystalline wisps still danced up from her mouth with every breath.

“One last little trick.” Irula offered her a handful of dried mushrooms — a non-glowing strain — in a cloth bundle. “Try one of those. Tell me what you feel.”

“Hmm.” Mokou sampled one. They were seasoned very lightly, only to accentuate the natural flavor. It was difficult to pick out new sensations against the background of sudden-onset frost breath. It took her a moment to grasp what the chef meant. “Oh. Oh! I am not thirsty at _all.”_

Irula nodded in satisfaction. “Snack on those every hour or so and you won’t need a drink from here to the Stilt.”

“That’s one hell of a pastry,” said Mokou, in quiet awe.

“Certified legendary,” Irula grinned their sharp grin.

Thinking on their hospitality over the last few days and their parting boons left Mokou at a loss for words. She nearly felt like crying again. “Thank you, again. For—”

Irula swept her up into a crushing hug. “You just stay safe.”

“I’ll try,” said Mokou. Now she cried. She returned the embrace.

Agate cleared her throat pointedly. “The longer we dawdle, the smaller the window for hospitable travel becomes.”

“Bye Irula,” said Mokou, muffled against the fabric of their tunic. She pulled back and gave the best smile she could muster.

The chef patted her shoulder. “You wanna pay me back? Come back to visit in one piece.”

Mokou laughed faintly. “For someone who doesn’t believe in debt, you can sure think of a lot of ways for me to pay you back.”

“You drank a lot of water,” said Irula. Their mock gravity passed and left a bittersweet smile. “Safe travels, Mokou. Live and drink.”

Mokou gave a parting wave. She set off after Agate, frost glimmering with every breath. Sunlight gleamed down the distant chrome pillar that split the eastern sky, a herald of the coming day. After few dozen paces, light graced the tops of the Stilt’s spires. A few dozen more and it spilled across the salt pans, washing away dawn’s crimson garb with the dazzling white of day.

“We going to the Stilt?” asked Mokou.

Agate did not look back to answer. “Yes. You are not prepared for Qud. If I am to be saddled with your presence for the next few weeks of my life then I will remedy this to the extent that it is in my power. If, that is, your ignorance can indeed be remedied.”

“Now, when you say saddled—” Mokou began.

“You waste precious moisture when you speak. Doubly so in Moghra’yi.”

“Because I bet we’d get there faster if I could ride you.”

Agate unholstered her pistol, checked its energy cell and exhaust port, then holstered it once more. “Ask at your peril.”

Mokou had expected that to get a rise out of Agate, but part of her still felt it was a sincere and sensible suggestion. The hindren’s casual stride was a brisk pace for Mokou. Her boots hadn’t survived the crossing, forcing her to borrow a pair of Irula’s sandals. They fit her better than anything else she’d borrowed, at least, but they weren’t ideal for long distances. There was bound to be someplace at the Stilt she could get boots.

As the sun rose further, the heat built steadily and undeniably. Mokou shifted the borrowed blanket from her shoulders to her head as a makeshift hood to keep the sun off. The glow from the hoarshroom pastries subsided after a time, but frost still danced on her breath and her body still ran cooler. The hood helped capture some of that chill. Whenever thirst threatened to creep back in, she ate another mushroom. Despite everything, this leg of the desert passage was already the most auspicious by far. She had Irula to thank for that.

“You know,” began Mokou. She let a hint of needling satisfaction enter her tone and quickened her pace to try to draw up next to Agate. “Irula doesn’t cook for you like they cook for me.”

“An earth-shattering observation!” With a deft bit of hoofwork, Agate swung herself around until she walked backwards, facing Mokou. Her pace held steady, and she never left the pool of shade cast by her hoversled. “Do you somehow believe that the effort becomes insincere when tooled for a different individual’s preferences?”

“No,” Mokou scowled. “I mean—” What did she mean? Admittedly, part of her was just fishing for something to hold over Agate. Part of her recognized the upswing in her mood buoyed by her improved prospects. As long as she was talking, she staved off the sorts of thoughts that inevitably dragged it back down.

“Look there,” said Agate, pointing off to the south, stride unbroken.

Mokou looked south. The pans shimmered in the heat, but something else shimmered above them. At this distance, it seemed like a glittering, winged ribbon, tracing lazy spirals in the air around unseen thermals. “Is that a dawnglider?”

“Yes,” said Agate. “Were you at all aware of it?”

“No,” Mokou admitted. She stopped for a moment to observe it. It was lovely at a distance, peaceful. She remembered Irula saying they breathed fire.

“Keep moving,” Agate said. “It may yet continue to ignore us.”

Mokou grumbled wordlessly and fell in behind the hindren once more. Agate spun forward and continued on.

“You waste precious attention when you speak. This will kill you.” Agate called back. “You must be aware of everything around you. You must translate this awareness into decisive action. You must not hesitate. Hesitation will kill you.”

Mokou said nothing. Apparently, speaking was the problem. She kept her silence, brooding the rest of the way to the Stilt.


	8. Stiltsong I

It was a city of salt-scoured chrome, canvas in constant flux, and cacti in the spaces between. Hawkers struck tents and raised them again to follow the shadows of holy structures. Prayer flags and bunting fluttered in the tempered breeze, tethering gleaming spires to their satellite yurts. Holy folk in robes and masks congregated around campfires and flowed to and from the grand cathedral at the city’s heart. The bustle and clamor was jarring in contrast to the peace of Irula’s kitchen and the solitude of Moghra’yi.

Even in the city, Agate was unrelenting in her pace. The press seemed to melt around her for just long enough to close in again behind her. Mokou shouldered her way after the hindren and kept her hands on her canteens.

“Hey,” said Mokou, between heavy breaths. She lifted her voice over the bustle. “I need a break.”

Agate continued forward, unperturbed.

“I need a break!” Mokou repeated. “We’ve been going nonstop all morning! You’re too damn fast!”

Agate looked back over her shoulder and flicked an ear in irritation. “I heard you. This way.”

She led them off the thoroughfare and into a large tent. It was slightly cooler out of the sun, but what relief the shade brought was muddled slightly by the hazy pipesmoke suffusing the atmosphere. Shadowed figures lounged on cushions, arrayed casually around low tables and wide hookahs. Mokou settled herself heavily on the nearest unoccupied cushion. Agate folded her legs beneath her and joined her. The hoversled bobbed near the ceiling.

“Need some goddamn boots,” Mokou groaned.

“Yes,” said Agate. “And sun protection, eye protection, sturdier garb that isn’t borrowed, spare canteens, food, medicine, a bedroll, ammunition, a gun — Ayvah, you don’t even have a gun. You don’t have any sort of weapon.”

“Lost my gun in the crossing. Usually I just punch things,” said Mokou. “Got some magic, too.”

“An esper?” asked Agate. “You still need a gun.”

Mokou had known quite a few espers and always felt a touch envious of how seemingly effortless their powers came. It wasn’t psionics, when Mokou wielded the flames. It was the precise and demanding application of esoteric arts she’d mastered over the ages. But she didn’t feel like explaining this to Agate. There was something else bothering her — something that snagged insistently at her instincts.

“And you have two canteens of water with which to acquire all these and still see you out of Moghra’yi and across Qud,” Agate continued. She loosed a slow, irritated sigh.

Mokou’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. She could finally take stock of the tent’s other denizens. Jittery scavengers, shawled pilgrims, several humanoid goats sharing a bottle of wine, and there, deep in the furthest corner of the tent, one of the biggest spiders she’d ever seen hung idly from thick, intricate webwork. It was bulbous and spindly, almost twice her size, and bedecked with disproportionately large fangs. It was undoubtedly what set off her instincts.

“Hey,” she whispered urgently. “Giant spider.”

“That would be a greater voider,” said Agate. “And were it not a convert to the Mechanimist faith, it would have undoubtedly spirited you off to its larder-cave and made provisions of you.”

Mokou grunted. “You’re telling me that spider found religion?”

“Mechanimists are nothing if not persistent in their proselytizing,” Agate replied. “All manner of beings from every stratum of Qud make pilgrimage here. Physical predation is discouraged in the holy city.”

“What about outside the holy city?”

Agate gave a cold, thin smile. “Everyone has to eat.”

Mokou sighed. It was a familiar sort of dynamic. “I get it. Do I have enough to get all the crap I need?”

“Flatly, no. Though physical predation may be banned, economic predation is fair game.”

“Fuck,” said Mokou. She reached for the mouthpiece of the nearest hookah and unholstered it.

Agate eyed the motion dubiously. “Those are communal, you know. Do you want a disease?”

“S’fine,” said Mokou. She drew. It was packed with something unfamiliar. She drew to ease her frustration more than anything. She spoke again through a mouthful of aromatic smoke. “I can’t actually get diseases. Fully immune.”

The hindren stared in stunned disbelief. Mokou grinned. That was far more satisfying than the waterpipe.


	9. Stiltsong II

It was a city of song. It swept through the city from camp to camp and throat to throat in one great, staggered round. Indistinct voices in holy harmony filtered over the tents and into the midday street.

“What are they singing?” asked Mokou.

“Dogma and doggerel,” replied Agate. She seemed disinclined to say more. The song moved past them and quiet returned to their dusty stretch of the Stiltgrounds.

“I’m getting hungry,” Mokou announced. She wasn’t just getting hungry. She was getting anxious. For every bit of gear pieced together from the markets of the Stilt, she’d parted with far more water than she liked. She had less than half the water she’d started the day with. They hadn’t even touched what Agate considered to be the most critical pieces: protective garb and a gun. At least she had boots again.

“Already?” Agate’s tone hovered somewhere between curiosity and annoyance. Loath as Mokou was to admit it, the hindren was a ferocious haggler. Mokou could only imagine how catastrophic the provisioning process would go without someone who actually knew what a dram could buy. Or what a dram  _ was. _

“Is there a good place to eat around here?” With every step, Mokou sensed the emptiness that had crept into her canteens. “Preferably, like, free?”

“It is considered poor form to charge for meals in Stilt cuisine, and indeed in the culinary tradition of greater Qud. They only charge if you wish to experiment with the ingredients yourself.” Agate gestured a few tents down the road. There were fewer folk about in the stifling heat of midday. “There’s a kitchen. See for yourself.”

Mokou pushed aside the tent’s entry curtain and stepped inside, alone. There were a few tall tables around the sides of the tent and a clay stove in the center. Some sort of camel-person in an apron and a cylindrical hat sat next to the stove, fanning herself. She brightened at the entrance of a new patron.

“Welcome, friend!” said the dromedary chef. “Sit anywhere you’d like, I’ll have something for you in a moment.”

“Thanks,” said Mokou. She settled down to wait. From the scent, there was something already cooking. “Hey, sorry if this is a rude question, but what are you?”

The chef loosed a brief, braying laugh. “No offense taken, friend. I am a dromad, a saltstrider. My kind trade across the desert. Perhaps you’ve seen our caravans? Don’t let the great tortoises frighten you off, friend. They’re gentle.”

She hadn’t seen them, somehow. Perhaps the arbitrary course she had picked through Moghra’yi took her through the least-traveled stretches of the salt wastes. Next time she had to cross it, she resolved to find a caravan first. Already, the chef bustled over with a steaming dish.

“Here you are, friend. A recipe of mine I like to call…” The chef paused with a hint of pride. “‘Rice with Water.’ Imported all the way from the Pale Marshes!”

“Oh, thanks,” said Mokou. It was, indeed, a bowl of steamed rice. A bit of shredded vinewafer had been sprinkled on top, reminiscent of nori. Sampling it, she found that the resemblance faded past the visual effect. It was far too mild to particularly notice. The rice itself was soggy and starchy, as though it hadn’t been rinsed before being cooked in too much water. It was at least hydrating and satiating. Perhaps the most she could say for it was that it seemed practical to fix in large batches ahead of time to serve on-demand.

“Ahh, I can see that you’re speechless with the luxury of it,” said the dromad. She winked and leaned in conspiratorially. “Not a word of lie, friend: I studied under a chef who studied under Agate Severance Star herself.”

“No shit?” said Mokou.

The dromad leaned back and nodded in satisfaction. “That’s why my recipes are the best.”

“It’s, um,” Mokou chewed. “It’s been a while since I’ve had rice. I missed it.” She still found herself missing it — missing what could be done with it. It wasn’t the  _ worst _ rice she’d ever had, but then, immortality skewed that bar low.

There was a rustle of fabric from the entryway, and the crunch of hooves on salt. The dromad turned in greeting before her expression fell in chagrin. Agate Severance Star strode to an empty table and rested her folded hands upon it to wait in silence. Her hoversled blocked the exit.

“Ah,” said the dromad. Her voice cracked. “Anything I can get you, friend?”

“I’ll have what she’s having,” said Agate.

Mokou turned slightly to better watch the proceedings while she finished her rice. The dromad prepared another bowl for Agate with trembling hands. She offered it forth solemnly. Agate sampled it, then set down her cutlery and folded her hands once more.

“Who trained you?” asked Agate.

“Ah—” the dromad stammered. “I— That is—”

Agate pressed on. “I am merely asking for a name. Which of my pupils taught you that the prestige of an ingredient is a suitable substitute for flavor? Unless, of course,” she leaned subtly towards the hapless dromad, never raising her voice. “—you  _ lied?” _

“Please— You—”

Agate’s expression remained fixed and intense. “It’s a simple question.”

“You gonna finish that?” asked Mokou. Agate held her serving out wordlessly. Mokou took it and kept eating. Seeing this and perhaps interpreting it as enthusiasm, the dromad rallied.

“I was letting the focal ingredient speak for itself! Friend, how did you like it?”

“It’s rice, chief,” Mokou said through a mouthful of it. “Doesn’t have a lot to say on its own.”

_ “Who trained you?” _ Agate asked again.

“I— I—” the dromad sank in on herself in defeat. “I lied, then. It catches the ear.”

Agate snorted in distaste. “Did you think me a myth?”

“No,” said the dromad. She withered under Agate’s scorn. Her voice came low and miserable. “What can I give you to pretend as though I never said that?”

“It so happens that I must provision for a journey to the Heptagon,” said Agate. “Open your stores.”

The dromad hurried to her pantries along the back of the tent and opened them for Agate’s perusal.

“Woah,” said Mokou. She finished the remainder of Agate’s serving quickly. “This a shakedown now? Get some rice.”

Agate cast a glance back over her shoulder in acknowledgment. She hefted a sack from the pantry to sling onto her trailing hoversled. She turned back to the pantry and continued to browse.

“You’re with her?” The dromad sputtered, looking back and forth between the two of them. “This was a sting!”

Mokou shrugged and stacked the empty bowls together. “Use less water next time. Keeps it from getting soggy.”

After several more selections from the dromad’s pantry, Agate fished a book from her sled. “Do not think yourself without recompense,” she said, handing it to the dromad. “I leave you with two things. The first is my mercy. The second is a copy of my  _ Blood and Fear Cookbook. _ Engrave it upon your soul before you think to invoke my name again.”

With that, Agate turned to leave. She paused in the doorway. “And scour your dishes. That one thinks she can’t catch glotrot.”

She left without another glance and without waiting for Mokou. Mokou took a moment to pat the dromad on the shoulder. “Hey. You okay? We good?”

The dromad looked from the cookbook in her trembling grasp to the empty entryway. “A personalized rebuke from Agate Severance Star!” She sighed. “Who else can claim the same? Friend, come back any time.”

“We good,” Mokou nodded. She left the tent and loped down the sun-beaten street after Agate. She drew level with the hindren and slowed her pace slightly to match.

“Hey,” Mokou said. “You wanna warn me next time you send me somewhere you have a personal vendetta against?”

Agate stopped abruptly. “This was not personal. I could have chosen any kitchen in the Stilt arbitrarily and the outcome would be the same.” She fixed her stare upon Mokou.  _ “Every. Single. One. Does this.” _

“So you’re hot shit right now,” said Mokou. “Isn’t that like, flattering?”

“Defamation is not  _ flattery. _ This is the crisis that I am leaving unaddressed and uncorrected for the sake of  _ you.” _ Her finger jabbed into Mokou’s chest. “For your doomed and witless errand.”

Mokou scowled back at her. “So a bunch of shitty cooks are nipping at your heels. What do they even matter? What harm is that camel-lady doing with her bad rice?”

“They harm the names of greater Chefs than they will ever know. They harm every talent who dies alone and unappreciated because they lack the wealth and connections to gain space for a kitchen at the Stilt. Thus leaving the control and direction of cuisine in the largest city in Qud in the hands of privileged oafs who don’t know how to season a  _ bowl of rice.” _

The hindren clutched at the sides of her head for a moment, then straightened, loosed a deep breath, and let her hands return to rest on the pommel and holster at her sides. She turned away and continued down the street.

There had been an unmistakable emphasis placed on Chef when Agate spoke it. Was she that self-aggrandizing, or were there others she meant?

“Where are we going?” asked Mokou.

Agate spoke without looking back. “We must procure for you a gun.”


	10. Stiltsong III

“Come in, friends,” said the arms merchant, over her shoulder. She turned from the rack of gleaming rifles. Her salt-hardened face fell in chagrin. “You’re back.”

“Three carbines and a semi-automatic pistol, if you please,” said Agate, striding to the counter.

“Woah, woah,” said Mokou. “I don’t need that many guns. I can’t even afford one!”

“These aren’t for you,” Agate replied.

The arms merchant pulled the requested firearms from the racks around her and set them on the counter. She clutched the countertop to still her trembling hands. Her voice was pleading, haunted. “You… are welcome to test them. Simply pick a direction and walk in it and there will be more than enough open space to do so, past the grounds.”

Agate said nothing, but inspected each gun in turn. As she checked the third carbine’s mechanisms and sights, she made a small appreciative noise. “This one is quite nice.”

“Yes!” said the arms merchant. She was sweating. “I thought so too!”

Agate set down the carbine and turned to her hoversled. She pulled out a stack of books and set them on the counter. “Five copies of  _ The Blood and Fear Cookbook. _ Signed. Share them as you see fit.”

“Yes, of course!” said the arms merchant. “Will you be needing ammunition?”

“Twelve magazines, please. Carbine.”

The arms merchant retrieved twelve magazines, each flush with bullets, from a crate beneath the counter. Agate passed half of them to Mokou. “For you.”

“Oh, thanks,” said Mokou, slipping them into a deep pocket. “I’ll just chuck ‘em real hard, I guess.”

“Shall I… wrap these up for you?” asked the arms merchant, desperately.

“No thank you,” said Agate, setting a toolkit and a four-sided chrome frustum of similar dimensions, like an incomplete pyramid, on the counter. “I’ll have them now.”

The color drained from the merchant’s face. Agate stripped the pistol into its base components — disengaging the slide, slipping out the barrel, unscrewing the grip. She toggled a switch on the frustum to open a glowing aperture on the topmost face, then fed the pistol chunks into it. She switched her process to the carbines. The chrome device never seemed to run out of interior space. The arms merchant began to visibly tremble. With two down, Agate turned her attentions to the final carbine — the nice one.

She removed the handguard and began to extricate the action. The arms merchant made a gurgling whine in the back of her throat. Shortly, the last carbine lay in pieces on the counter. These pieces, too, Agate fed to the frustum. This done, she sealed it once more and stowed it back on her sled.

“Live and drink, deathdealer,” said Agate.

“I’m sick to death of you!” cried the arms merchant. She burst into tears as Agate turned to leave. “You don’t respect me, you don’t care about what I do! You won’t even shoot my guns! Choke on your books!” 

The arms merchant slumped onto the counter and sobbed into her folded arms. Mokou backed out into the late afternoon street. Yet again, Mokou found herself catching up to the departing hindren.

“What the fuck was that?”

“The bit locker is an Eater technique. An expression of the ultimate fungibility of machine forms. It renders components into thin space for storage and extrudes them on demand.”

“I don’t mean your weird box,” said Mokou. “You’re a fucking terror!”

Agate said nothing. She led them south and west, following the deep shadow cast by the grand cathedral.

“Why’d you make me pay for all this other crap, if you can just drop books on people? If you can just squeeze guns out of your box?”

“Every single component stored within my ‘weird box’, as you so eloquently put it, is one that I have recovered through tremendous effort, great personal risk, or both. Clamoring for its fruits does not endear me to the prospect of sharing them.”

“I could have used that gun!” said Mokou. “Any of them! Didn’t even have to be the nice one!”

“I can make a  _ better gun,” _ said Agate. “And I will, if you can only cease your yammering for a moment. With these fresh components I can rectify the remaining deficiencies in your kit.”

Mokou blinked. “You could just tell me that.”

“Must I justify my every action to you?” asked Agate. She slowed her cadence with an insulting deliberateness. “I am going to a place where I can work.”

“Okay. Can’t read your fucking mind,” Mokou grumbled. “How many bits you got in that locker, anyway?”

Agate threw her hands up in exasperation. “How many dumplings have you eaten in your life?”

“Like, several orders of magnitude more than you think. I guarantee you don’t have that many bits.”

“Try me,” said Agate.

“No. I don’t fuck around about dumplings.”

They passed the facade of the cathedral and threaded through the crowds in front. Agate steered them south, away from the cathedral and towards a pair of chrome spires emerging from the salt. A wide, low tent was slung between the spires, covering a stretch where the ground dipped. Beneath this shaded canopy was a simple dwelling plaza. It had a welcoming layout focused around a cozy kitchen at the back and a large cushion-ringed hookah in the center.

Another hindren sat at the hookah. They raised their eyebrows at the company. Their skin was pale and subtly textured, and their fur was a pale green. They sported a spindly build and an extra pair of arms in addition to their deer-like lower body. They wore little beyond a pair of leather bracers and a comfortable-looking toga.

“You’re back early,” this new hindren said. Their voice was soft and carried a hint of a tease.

“My plans have changed,” said Agate. She strode to an unfurnished portion of the plaza and began to unpack her tools.

“Who’s this?” asked the hindren.

“Mokou,” said Mokou. “Fujiwara no Mokou. She’s taking me east.”

“Live and drink, Mokou. My name is Lulihart. A fellow pariah from the cervidian grove, like our Agate.”

Agate snorted at the mention, but continued her preparations.

“You’re wearing Irula’s clothes,” noted Lulihart.

“Oh!” said Mokou. “You know them? They really helped me out.”

“They fly in every now and again,” said Lulihart, with a fond smile. “You can leave the clothes with me. I’ll see them returned.”

Lulihart’s dwelling was sheltered from the crowds of the Stiltgrounds. Mokou nodded gratefully and took the opportunity to change. At a tailor’s shop earlier, she had picked out a high-necked sleeveless shell in black and a pair of red trousers with suspenders that actually fit her. The shell felt flattering and easy to move in, while the suspenders and trousers simply felt familiar. Lulihart watched her disrobe and change in sleepy-eyed interest.

Mokou donned her boots once more. “Not a lot of folks wear pants around here, do they?”

“They’re a rare sight in Qud,” said Lulihart. Of the room’s three occupants, only Mokou had anything covering her legs. “Is that an issue?”

“No, I’m used to it.” Mokou stood and stretched to feel out her outfit. It felt good to be in a fresh set of clothes.

Lulihart made a gesture of casual welcome. “Come and sit, friend Mokou. Share the waterpipe, if it is your pleasure. Is it your first visit to the Stilt?”

“First time in Qud,” said Mokou. She accepted Lulihart’s invitation. Whatever herb filled their waterpipe was smoother than the strain used in the communal rest tents.

The hindren blew a lazy ring of smoke. “How do you find it?”

“Hot. Dry.” Mokou leaned back into the cushion and sank in it. It was designed for occupants with more legs. “Cold, sometimes.”

“Once you’re out of the Moghra’yi, you’ll find it’s wet, too,” said Lulihart.

“Oh, good.”

“Well, it doesn’t stop being dry,” Lulihart clarified. “It’s just wet, too.”

Outside the plaza, the distant song swept across the city once more, as though it was a spoke of sound spinning clockwise around the hub of the cathedral. Lulihart hummed softly in anticipation as clusters of pilgrims closer and closer to the plaza took up the round.

“There it is again,” said Mokou. “What are they singing?”

Lulihart adopted a posture better suited for song and took a deep breath.

_“Immaculate chromium!”_ they sang.

Their voice, already lyrical, gained a power and projection when raised in song. The next lines stretched out in hymnal leisure.

_ “Spun on the cosmic loom,  
Who shattered inward then burst forth from beneath the crust of Earth.” _

Lulihart’s performance then dipped into the entrancing repetition of the round. Camps to the west droned the hymnal while camps to the east concluded. Agate, busying herself with her tools, flicked her ear in irritation.

_ “The flesh of my children rots for You.  
The flesh of my children rots for You.  
The flesh of my children rots for You.” _

Past the round, their voice climbed once more for the song’s finale.

_ “Fall on your knees!  
O hear the Argent Few!” _

The final note faded, leaving the dwelling plaza quiet once more. The round crept away westward, indistinct. Lulihart settled back down into their cushion and took up their hookah’s mouthpiece again.

“The Song of Gedonai,” they said. “From the Canticles Chromaic, verse… oh, I should really remember which verse, I hear it every day.”

“Are you a Mechanimist?” asked Mokou.

“No,” said Lulihart. “But it’s hard not to pick things up. There’s doubtless a branch of the faith out there that might sway me, but I’m content to let it come to me.”

“Branches?”

“The Mechanimists have nearly as many schisms as they have songs,” said Agate.

“The main branch resides here at the Stilt,” said Lulihart. “But there’s also the rondure-bearers, the branch of the Temple of the Rock beneath Bethesda Susa, the Kinfolk of the Starry Devil — though that one might be better called a cult.”

“They’re all cults,” scoffed Agate.

“This is just to name a few,” said Lulihart. It was hard to say whether their faint smile came from Agate’s irreverent interjection or simply from general demeanor.

“Huh,” said Mokou. It was still a bit bewildering, without knowing the basic tenets. “So what’s the difference between the main branch and like, subterranean Mechanimism?”

“The Temple of the Rock is constructed around a baetyl, I hear,” said Lulihart.

“Ohh,” said Mokou. “Those yelling rocks that make things? That makes sense, there’s gotta be some kind of spirit inside them that lets them yell and make things.”

“The yelling and spontaneous replication is a consequence of the degradation of their programming, not that of any sort of supernatural interference,” rebutted Agate. Aggravation seeped into her tone. “The baetyl enshrined at the Temple doesn’t even yell. Its condition is pristine.”

Mokou frowned. “What? Then how would anyone know to worship it?”

Agate sighed loudly in lieu of an explanation.

Lulihart chuckled. “Doesn’t need to speak for them to venerate it. Anything of the old world, the age of the Eaters, they hold in reverence regardless of sect.”

Mokou mulled on that in silence. She was very much a thing of the old world. Did that make her an Eater?

Lulihart continued in their languid, easy tone. “They hold that there’s life in the old tech, brought down to our world from the Kasaphesence, the chromium womb of creation. In the cathedral here, pilgrims offer that tech to the Sacred Well, in the hopes it might return to Her.”

“So it’s like, tool disposal?” asked Mokou.

“In a sense,” said Lulihart.

“It’s a waste of perfectly good tech,” muttered Agate.

“No, but it makes sense,” said Mokou. “I’ve seen what happens if you don’t dispose of a tool properly. Leave it to molder for a few decades and all of a sudden some weirdo pops out of it and starts flinging bullets everywhere. Can only imagine how bad that gets if the tool is like, a laser gun.”

Agate fixed Mokou with a stare of tormented incredulity. She set down her tools and turned to her sled. She extricated a rolled tube of heavy schematic paper from the sled’s load and hefted its weight in her hand. She flung it towards Mokou.

“What the fuck!” cried Mokou, ducking into a seated dodge. The tube struck the cushion where her head was a moment before and unfurled at the impact, spilling over her lap. It looked to be a schematic of some kind of energy weapon, full of bewildering technical details and blocks of dense handwriting.

“Tell me,” said Agate. “Where do you think the spirit is located in that eigenrifle?”

“Fuck off!” said Mokou. “It’s shaped by its use and emerges as a consequence of its neglect!”

Lulihart laughed uproariously. “Friend Mokou, you should visit the cathedral. Maybe you’ll find some commonality there.”

“Yeah, maybe I will,” Mokou grumbled, pushing aside the schematic and making to rise.

“Make yourself doubly useful,” said Agate. She pulled a stack of several books from her sled. “Return these to the library in the cathedral’s western narthex. First hall on the left.”

“Why don’t you do it your own damn self?” said Mokou, dusting off her trousers.

“I am  _ working _ on equipment that will keep  _ you _ from  _ death,” _ said Agate, slowing her cadence once more to better leave it dripping with disdain. She smiled coldly. “Furthermore, I am not welcome in their holy places.”

“Can’t imagine why,” scoffed Mokou. She snatched the stack of books from Agate’s outstretched grasp and left Lulihart’s plaza.


	11. Sopor and Sanctity

The Grand Cathedral was a structure intended to evoke awe, and to some extent it succeeded. Mokou gawked for a spell, putting off the errand imposed upon her to instead wander its halls of chrome and concrete. She couldn’t tell if the edifice and interior had been sculpted out of some titanic pre-existing structure or if it had simply been modeled after natural forms. It was a testament to the dreams of its architects, and to the laborers who transposed those dreams into the material, whoever they may have been. The footsteps and reverent tones of pilgrims echoed up into the cathedral’s airy vaults and birdsong filtered back down from delicate abodes in the rafters.

A deep weariness still crept into her explorations. For all the wonder and beauty around her, only its base elements could be older than she was. Who had carved the mural? Who had captured light to sculpt into the image of some patriarch of the faith? Who had mixed the concrete, and who poured? Who had quarried the marble, and who set it in the dais? Who had alloyed the chrome, and who wove it into fluted buttresses? They had lived and toiled and toasted and died unknown to her, but all somewhere within the span of her interminable existence. The matter itself was old, as ageless as she, but the labor that had shaped it into the present form was so, so new.

The weariness sapped at the joy of sightseeing. She remembered the errand. She retraced her wanderings to the entrance and swung into the western narthex, where Agate said the library was. Libraries never failed to lift her spirits. This one was no exception. She was immediately charmed by the clutter of its shelves. Her esteem for the Mechanimists rose in seeing that they dedicated an entire wing of their holy place to the preservation and circulation of knowledge both secular and otherwise. Dominating a corner of the library was a cushioned enclosure formed by a desk-island. Nearly filling it was what Mokou would have taken at first to be a boulder if not for its gentle breathing and priestess’s robes. A nameplate on the desk read “Sheba Hagadias”. A placard above the desk read “FOR ASSISTANCE, PLEASE WAKE LIBRARIAN.”

Mokou set the stack of books down on the desk near where part of the creature — the librarian — rested on its surface. She reached out and gently shook this part. The texture, she realized, was that of fur bearing a deeply geological camouflage. The librarian huffed deeply and lifted her head from under Mokou’s hand. She rose, unfolding in a soft shower of dust. A sleeved limb reached below the desk and delicately grasped a pair of spectacles with a tremendous claw to perch them on her ursine snout. She sat back on her haunches and yawned.

“Live and learn, traveler,” rumbled the librarian. “Welcome to the library at the Stilt. How can I assist you?”

“Um,” said Mokou. She took a step back to get a good look up at her. “You’re the librarian?”

“Sheba Hagadias, head librarian,” answered Sheba. Her voice was deep and gentle, as though she threatened to fall asleep at a moment’s notice. “Forgive me, this is your first visit, is it not?”

“Yeah,” Mokou said. “Where do we return books?”

Sheba peered down at the stack of books. “I’d not expected to get these back so soon. Agate sent you?”

“Yeah. Guess she doesn’t need them anymore.”

“And no polemic,” said Sheba, rifling through the stack. “A shame.”

“Were you expecting one? How did she even get these in the first place?”

“We have an arrangement,” Sheba chuckled. “She likes her pieces to be widely circulated. She often uses proxies to check out and return selections.”

“What are these books, anyway?”

“Her research materials. Several cookbooks from local chefs,” said Sheba, pawing each book to the fore in turn. “A geological text, a recent economic census of the Stilt, an agricultural treatise. More cookbooks. I swear the chefs here slip them onto the shelves while I’m sleeping.” 

“Wouldn’t seek ‘em out yourself, huh?” Mokou chuckled. “I bet at least one of them couldn’t screw up rice.”

“You would think so,” sighed Sheba. “I was looking forward to her polemic. The next time I have to fuel a hibernation, I’d rather the cuisine be better.”

Mokou said nothing. She was the reason the polemic was on hold. Sheba slid a heavy tome and an inkwell along the desk to Mokou. “Here you are. Sign for the return, or dictate to me and I will happily sign for you.”

“I can get it,” said Mokou. She put the quill to the entry Sheba indicated and signed.

Sheba blinked a bit of sleep away and leaned in with a curious squint. “What… logograms are these, traveler?”

“Oh,” said Mokou. She had written her name, almost unconsciously, in a writing system that had been extinct for several millennia. “It’s — it’s my name, Fujiwara no Mokou. Here, let me try—”

She managed a phonetic transliteration in one of the other texts she recognized from the checkout ledger.

“That was, uh,” Mokou put the quill back and scratched the back of her head. “Kanji. Don’t think anyone reads that anymore.”

“That’s a script I haven’t heard of,” said Sheba, turning the ledger to herself. She leaned in for a closer inspection of Mokou’s writing. “Please, tell me m—” The librarian interrupted herself with a colossal yawn. She slumped gently over the tome and slipped into a rumbling snore.

Mokou reached for Sheba’s head again, but paused with her hand extended. It had been so long. How much kanji did she even remember, at this point? Not enough to save it from being another ghost within her. There were so many, now. Was it worth waking her for the sake of a ghost?

Mokou shook the librarian softly.

“Mmff. Ahh?” said Sheba. She adjusted her spectacles and rose again. “Terribly sorry. Please wake me as much as you’d like. Where were we?”

“The library.”

“No, kanji,” said Sheba. “Tell me about it.”

“Don’t really know where to start,” said Mokou. “It’s a dead script for a dead tongue. It’s been dead since… longer than this cathedral’s been here. Only one other person knows it, maybe.” Kaguya probably remembered it better than she did. She always had the better memory.

“How did you come to know it, then?” asked Sheba. Her voice was resonant with curiosity.

“It was my native tongue,” said Mokou. She slipped her hands in her pockets and looked away. Over the shelves and parchments, through the beams of late sun and the motes suspended within their light. “It went and died without me.”

“It still lives in your fingers, it seems,” said Sheba. “It may yet revive with practice and cultivation. I would not give up on it just yet.”

Mokou sighed. “I don’t know. It’s been a few millennia since I’ve had much chance to use it.”

“How… old are you, Mokou?” asked Sheba.

“Don’t really know anymore.”

“Truly?” Sheba rumbled in sympathy. “You certainly don’t look old enough to warrant such forgetfulness.”

“Yeah, I know how I look.” She’d drunk the Hourai Elixir as a young woman. The cursed substance set her body in an eternal template that ensured she’d be perpetually and exhaustingly read as a twenty-something, albeit with a shock of white hair. “I’m old, I promise.”

Sheba blinked in a determined effort to cling to consciousness. “Do you have an estimate?”

“Past ten thousand it all just starts blurring together. It’s easy to lose track. There have been a few calendar changeovers. Also, like, did years change? I feel like years changed somewhere in there.” Mokou sucked air through her teeth. “I’m really fucking old.”

“You…” Sheba yawned tremendously, sinking again behind her desk. Her awe still slipped around the yawn. “... are an Eater.”

“Everyone keeps saying that — Eater. What is that?”

Sheba had fallen asleep again. Mokou woke her.

“The Eaters,” Sheba yawned again, but a yawn of awakening rather than a yawn of slumbering, “of Earth. Those from the Long Before. Some say our Argent Fathers walked amongst them. To think one would grace my humble library!”

“That’s what folks call us? I guess I can see it. People got weird for a bit and everything got really extractive.” Mokou considered for a moment that she was conversing with a giant bespectacled bear. “I guess people stayed weird.”

Sheba laughed. She shuffled in her desk for a fresh parchment. “I would treasure, immeasurably, anything you can tell me of the age of the Eaters.”

“I’ll see what I can remember. I stayed in one place for a good few thousand years. It was something like a closed ecosystem. By the time it fell apart, everything outside had moved past us. It was all… hard, and shiny, and overwhelming. I kinda kept my head down.” She sighed. “Then all  _ that _ fell apart. Got ugly. Got cold.”

“How long do you plan to be in town, Mokou?” asked Sheba. “I would relish the chance to interview you in depth.”

“I don’t know,” shrugged Mokou. “I’m getting ready to head east with Agate. She’s putting off her polemic for it.”

“Well, I can hardly blame her!” Sheba laughed. “She gets to travel with an Eater!”

“I don’t think she knows that yet, actually,” said Mokou. “I don’t think she’d believe me. Have you ever heard of the House of Eternity?”

Sheba considered this. “The name is unfamiliar, but perhaps I’m forgetting a reference to it somewhere. Is this your destination, or somewhere from the time of the Eaters?”

“Both,” said Mokou. “Back where I lived — Gensokyo — the House of Eternity was home to another immortal. This new one is somewhere in the Moon Stair. I think it’s her again. She’s… another survivor.”

“Oh,” blinked Sheba. Her expression grew somber. “You aim for the Moon Stair. I see the interview window is narrower than I thought.”

“Look, I’m immortal. Is it really that bad out there?”

“I have heard only tales of the Moon Stair. They are the sorts of tales that chill more in what is left untold. There are fates other than death that you invite upon yourself should you fix yourself upon it.”

Mokou turned and paced slowly along the perimeter of the desks. With her hands in her pockets, she gave an air of casual monotony. The librarian’s gaze followed her steadily. It seemed no one wanted to help her find Kaguya again. Of course Mokou knew it was a bad idea, but it was  _ her _ bad idea. The very thought of that reunion, the very thought of Kaguya, filled her with turmoil, longing, nostalgia. Dull panicked anxiety undercut with the throbbing haptic memories of every single way their changeless bodies had slid together and torn each other apart. All of it churning together in an inescapable morass of emotions.

But they were  _ her _ emotions, refined and fermented over the long millennia. Here, another kind soul wanted her to stay — but what did they know of her emotions? What  _ could _ they know?

“Can’t fuck up my life worse than I already have,” said Mokou.

She glanced back at Sheba when no response came. Somewhere in Mokou’s pacing, the librarian must have dozed off again. She shook Sheba awake again, gently.

“Is it really okay that I’m keeping you up like this?” asked Mokou.

“Gracious, yes!” Sheba replied, huffing the sleep away. “Mokou, you are a lens into ages undreamt of by those of the now. You are a repository of tongues unheard. Any librarian worth her water would hate to see such knowledge steering towards its own destruction.”

Mokou laughed softly. A pang stirred in her of something like nostalgia, something like gratitude. Perhaps she could prolong her stopover. “Well, look, I’m not doing anything right now. Agate still wants me out of her hair. Let’s call this a preliminary interview.”

“Magnificent!” said Sheba.

Mokou pulled up a stool. Sheba summoned an assistant librarian for uninterrupted transcription. They talked for some time about the world that was, the world she’d lost. The sun sank. In its place, moonlight rose to seep through the high windows of the Grand Cathedral’s library wing. Clergy passed through to light oil lanterns between the stacks. Mokou complained of thirst and Sheba sent for a bottle of honey wine. They spoke until Sheba could no longer easily be roused from her insistent hibernation.


	12. Catch and Release

The scent of simmering dawnglider, fragrant smoke, and machine oil drifted in Lulihart’s tent-plaza. It was a familiar scent for Agate. It made for a comforting undercurrent to her tinkering. The heat relented in the twilight, and crowds flocked in the square outside. The plaza’s natural walls muffled some portion of the bustle, but what remained still necessitated Agate don a pair of noise-blocking headphones tooled to fit her cervine ears.

She sat before the extended workbench leaf of her hoversled. Her final project of the evening took shape upon it. She slotted it together component by component, filter by mesh by pin by plate as they printed from her bit locker. Together, they wove into a full-body suit for a bipedal wearer. It was sleek yet unobtrusively reinforced, and its panels of vulcanized plastifer were bleached to blend into the salt pans. Each panel sheltered a series of filtration meshes and internal reservoirs. It was the last of these, along an interior calf, that Agate finally fastened into place. It was complete.

She leaned back and shook out her hands with a sigh. Behind her, Lulihart took the opportunity to make their presence felt. Two pairs of hands slid under the back of her shirt. Agate pressed herself back into the touch to encourage Lulihart’s thumbs as they sought out knots of tension to dispel.

“Finally done, are you?” asked Lulihart, leaning in close. They spoke with a volume suited for casual conversation, but with their lips by Agate’s covered ears it was muffled into a gentle intimacy.

“For now,” Agate replied. She began to unbutton her shirt to grant more leeway to Lulihart’s deft hands. One pair of hands reached up to work her shoulderblades while the lower pair slid down to knead into the span of muscle and fur that linked her upper and lower torsos.

“You’ve put in a lot of effort,” said Lulihart. This statement was self-evident. A modest pile of freshly-manufactured equipment lay in a heap on Agate’s hoversled to keep it off of the salt-tracked tiles of Lulihart’s plaza. She did not see the need to draw attention to the effort.

“Yes,” Agate sighed. “Irula would be cross with me if I let her wander off and die. This is a favor.”

“Oh?” said Lulihart. Agate could hear the coy smile in their voice. “Thought you might have taken a fancy to her.”

“Please,” Agate snorted. “There are standards of grooming and personal hygiene that I require my partners to meet.”

Lulihart chuckled. It was a delicate noise when muffled. “Still, there’s a gravity to her, don’t you think?”

“Is this assessment informed by your psionics?” asked Agate. She released a sigh as Lulihart dug into a particularly tenacious bit of tension in her lower back.

“Not quite. My gifts give me sway over cold and kinetics,” Lulihart said. As if to demonstrate, they cooled their touch to further soothe the muscles they just kneaded. “The contents of another’s mind are as much a mystery to me as to you. It’s just in the way she carries herself, I think.”

Agate rolled her eyes and leaned forward to brace herself against her sled to grant Lulihart a better angle. “She’s careless.”

“You could stand to have fewer cares, if this is what they do to you,” teased Lulihart. They tugged Agate’s shirt up and away and set in with their elbows. “You’re coiled up like a spring.”

“Would that I could afford not to care,” groaned Agate. “This favor delays my polemic.”

“See? Gravity. You’re already swept up in it.”

Agate did not respond. There was an irritating kernel of plausibility to the assertion. She turned it over internally as Lulihart’s ministrations climbed to finish with her neck and shoulders. For her own part, she saw no reason to consider this a matter of fate or convergence. Gravity was simply another natural force; forces could be modeled, measured, and predicted. People rarely afforded the same courtesy.

* * *

Sheba slept.

“I haven’t seen her so excited in months,” said the assistant scribe. She pressed upon Mokou parchment, ink, the rest of the honey wine, some water from the library’s discretionary reserves. “Walk with the Fathers, friend.”

The assistant bid her goodnight. The taste of honey wine lingered on Mokou’s tongue. She felt resolved to stay a while longer. To stay would be to find her place in history again. As a side benefit, it would certainly curry goodwill with her reluctant guide.

Standing there in the library, not quite ready to return, something dislodged itself to bubble up within her countless memories. It was something in the librarian’s congenial demeanor, it was the flexing of dormant linguistic pathways, it was the weight of impending reunion upon her emotions, it was a specific sensory cocktail of dust, parchments, fur, and moonlight. There had been another, so long ago, in that place.

Keine. The teacher. The history-eating half-beast. Her dearest friend, her longest love, her bitterest loss.

She blinked at tears and turned away, but the memories were a flood now. The centuries they’d spent together had been truly the happiest of her life. Centuries of love and stability. A great enough span that it would not fade so easily from her memories. She braced herself against the wall with a groping hand as she stumbled from the library. She still kept so much of Keine within her. The creases on her gentle face, the sound of her shimmering laugh, her wild energy beneath the moon, her favorite meal, her favorite hat — the silly little thing.

Keine had understood what Kaguya was to Mokou. Keine had never judged her for her relapses. She had always offered instead an open heart, a supporting shoulder. But beyond that, Mokou hadn’t _needed_ Kaguya when she had Keine. And she had her for so long — such a peaceful age of beauty they’d shared. Then, one day, just as peacefully, just as beautifully, Keine had slipped from her life and back into history. It had been expected. It had not made the separation or the acceptance any easier. The only solace Mokou could find in the long ages since her passing was that Keine never had to endure the end of Gensokyo. She had died a century before the great shattering of the sky, the scars torn into the moon. A century before the war.

Crossing the threshold of the library narthex, Mokou slumped back against the wall of the grand entryway and slid to the marble floor. Sobs billowed from her. Precious moisture pattered against the cooling marble. There was so much of Keine she had already lost. Every time she thought of her again, another detail slipped into oblivion. What was her scent, her taste? Mokou could only tell when a sensation was _like_ her, but those fleeting familiarities orbited a true core that had already eroded. What were her vows, and what had Mokou pledged to her in return? She could remember only what emotions those words had evoked in her, but not the evocation itself. Someday even those ephemera would abandon her. Until then she would cling them to her breast even as they seared her, like coals dug from a snowbank.

She wept, drawn up against herself. The weight of grief bent her grasp of time and body. How long had it been since she last allowed herself to feel the weight of her lost love? Had it lessened since the last time, or grown? Mokou savored the memories, though they hurt. It was something like time spent with her again. The core had eroded long ago.

There came the whisper of fabrics and the shuffling of sandals on marble. Someone had stopped in front of her.

“Ahh, child,” said the newcomer. A man’s voice, redolent in assuredness. “To shed your tears for the Argent Fathers is blessed penance indeed.”

She looked up and met the smiling face of a preacher in chrome finery. Grief ignited into fury.

“Fuck off,” she growled between sobs.

“There is no shame in weeping, child!” The preacher spoke in blithe, placative confidence. “To be so stricken by awe in holy communion is an honor to the Fathers!”

Mokou balled a fist.


	13. Hot and Spiny

Lulihart’s touch trailed off with a familiar tracing down the length of Agate’s spine. Their tracing led into a squeeze of her hind-hips. Agate rose from her stretch and shrugged her shirt back down, though she left it unbuttoned. She sat back, propping herself up on her forelegs and turning to face Lulihart. She ran her hand behind their ear and looked down at them with a faint smile. Two pariahs a long way from their ancestral land.

“What’s to stop you from working on your polemic when you can?” Lulihart asked, with a bemused look of their own. “Maybe you could even convince her to stay a while.”

Agate’s ear attempted to flick, but the noise-blockers stifled the motion. Her hand slid further behind Lulihart’s head, through their short-kempt hair. She let it slide between her fingers, then grasped a handful of it and tightened her hold, pulling back on their head. They huffed a slow sigh of anticipation as Agate loomed in closer.

“Too many distractions,” she said.

Her lips met Lulihart’s. She caught one of their probing hands with her own and laced her fingers through theirs, but that left three more for them to run over her belly, her breasts, her dappled fore-hips. Agate tugged their head back further to break their kiss.

She was fond of the harmony between them. It was not always predictable in the sense that natural forces were predictable, but the variety that arose from that undercurrent of chaos enriched their relationship rather than destabilized it. It enticed her to imagine spending a week or two dallying in their plaza, embroiled in their deft touches and hospitable cuisine.

The complicating factor was what surrounded the plaza. Crowds, clamor, gouging and incessant sermons and hymns. The cold materiality of the matter was this: forging words into a corrective force demanded a discipline she could not muster in the Stilt’s environs. It was a different sort of discipline entirely than that which was demanded by the culinary or technological arts. She would not have gotten where she was if she could not summon the discipline to cook or tinker even in adverse conditions. But composing, writing, expressing her own sentiments and observations, all demanded she find a precise sort of environment before she could access them with the standards she demanded of herself.

She huffed as Lulihart found a potent spot to press a thumb. Perhaps her fellow pariah sensed some of what she felt without her needing to voice it. Perhaps they simply accepted the way of things with that enviable adaptability. Agate released her grip on Lulihart’s hair and scratched the back of their scalp.

“Well then, if you aren’t staying,” Lulihart began, their heavy-lidded eyes twinkling with some lascivious purpose. Agate clenched and tugged again. They hissed mid-sentence but their suggestion still escaped. “—give me a bite of that glowcrust.”

“It’s not  _ ripe _ yet,” admonished Agate, letting a trace of scandalized indignation seep into her tone.

“And you’ll be halfway across Qud by the time it is,” said Lulihart. They licked their lips. “I like it better when it’s still a bit sour anyway. Come on. Let me at that thing.”

Agate grinned down and leaned in closer, pulling Lulihart’s head back to match pace, keeping their mouth just out of reach. “Come and get it.”

Lulihart made to lunge forward in a fruitless tease, but Agate’s grip kept their jaws at bay. They tried to pull Agate closer by their clasped hands, but Agate held her ground. In a last-ditch effort, they shifted their lower hands up under the fabric of her unbuttoned shirt until they encircled her breasts, then pushed in with both thumbs. Agate gasped and slackened her grip just enough for Lulihart to rise and plant their teeth on a ridge of glowcrust that traced over Agate’s cheekbone.

The bite went deep enough through the frosty mycelial lattice that their teeth scraped over Agate’s flesh beneath. It sent a shiver down her spine. Lulihart stripped down a bite-sized chunk of glowcrust and peeled it painlessly away from Agate’s face as though it were dead skin.

“Nnf,” they said in muffled satisfaction before they swallowed it. “It’s like peeling styrofoam. Love it.”

Agate kissed them again while the taste was still fresh in their puckering mouth. She traced her touch forward from the back of their head, down along their jaw, to grasp them under the chin instead. She broke off the kiss and licked from her lip the drip of fungal sap that trickled from the fresh bite in her glowcrust. “It’s going to ripen irregularly now, you know. Greedy.”

“Thank you for indulging me,” Lulihart winked. Already a faint teal glow seeped through their green fur from metabolizing it.

“You could always grow your own.” Agate fished a handkerchief from her breast pocket and pressed it to the bite.

“It wouldn’t be as special if I could just do it whenever,” said Lulihart.

Before the two could seek deeper indulgences, Lulihart’s ears swiveled towards the plaza’s entry. “Sounds like the Esthers,” they said. “Just one, maybe two.”

“Perhaps you have a dinner guest,” said Agate. She slipped off her headphones and the Stilt’s cacophony washed over her again. Below it all and closer were the sounds that heralded the warden of the Stiltgrounds: a clank of plate and the scuffing of boots. Agate stood to await the new arrival and buttoned her shirt back up.

Shortly she rounded the canvas entryway: a muscular and salt-hardened woman with dark skin, clad in a suit of carbide plate armor and a shawled headwrap dyed a vivid red. The Wardens Esther, though at present she was sembled into a single manifestation. Marched along in front of her was a familiar figure in red and white: Mokou, looking considerably worse for wear. She turned her bruised, red-rimmed scowl from Esther to Agate as the warden released the grip on her wrists and pushed her forward.

“This one yours?” asked Esther, her voice blunt and forceful. “She broke Eschelstadt II’s nose. With her elbow.”

Agate burst into laughter that would not subside for a full minute.

“Are you okay? What happened?” asked Lulihart, rising and crossing the plaza to steady Mokou.

“Fucker was talking at me like he  _ knew _ me,” Mokou grunted. Her voice was husky with pain. “Would’ve sent him crying for his dads if he didn’t have his goons with him.”

“A couple cathedral paladins had to peel her off of him, and then I had to peel  _ them _ off of  _ her,” _ said Esther, arms crossed and face grim. “Damn mess even woke Sheba up. It’s thanks to the good librarian that this one’s  _ walking _ back out of the cathedral.”

Agate sat back roughly on her haunches as her fit peaked.

“Here,” said Lulihart, fetching a strip of shimmering bark from a pouch and offering it to Mokou. “Chew this for the pain. Fair warning, it’s psychotropic.”

Mokou nodded wordlessly, took it, and began chewing. Esther stepped past them to confront Agate.

“Did you put her up to this?” Esther demanded.

“No, no,” said Agate. Her laughter subsided, but her smile couldn’t be suppressed. “Her actions are entirely her own.”

“Every time you come through, it’s something. Here,” said Esther. She unclipped a message tube from her belt and held it out to Agate. “The Gunsmith’s Union has issued a formal complaint against your treatment of its members.”

Agate opened the tube and scanned the missive within, then tossed it onto her hoversled. “Was there anything else?”

Esther’s handsome face ticked into a momentary grimace. “No, think that about covers it.”

“Staying for dinner, Esther?” asked Lulihart. They led Mokou to a cushion on their way back to the kitchen.

“Love to, but I got work to do,” sighed Esther. She cast a parting glance around the plaza with a weary look. “Somebody has to make sure no one out there gets it into their pretty little heads to come looking for retribution.”

“Drop back anytime,” Lulihart waved to the parting warden. They doled out portions of slow-cooked dawnglider and spinefruit in hearty sauce into several bowls and brought them out to serve dinner to their remaining guests. Agate had been looking forward to this meal all day. Lulihart’s rendition of the Hot and Spiny, the Stilt’s signature dish, was far and away the best in the city. She joined Lulihart and Mokou and settled into a cushion of her own around the central hookah.

“Oh, fuck,” said Mokou. She seemed to be ignoring the provided cutlery and instead using the un-gnawed portion of witchwood bark as a scoop for the dish. Her eyes watered from the spices. Had she been crying? “That flavor just keeps going.”

“Probably the spinefruit,” said Lulihart. “It’s the fruiting body of the fracti that grow around here. There’s a lot to focus on.”

“I wasn’t feeling it much, but wow,” said Mokou. “Not anymore. It’s a mandala in my mouth. Do you do this, like, professionally?”

“I cook how I like, when I like,” Lulihart smiled.

“You could, though!”

“I don’t want to. If my guests like it, that’s all I need.”

Agate found herself with a faint smile still. This was a conversation she’d already had with Lulihart. If they only so desired, they could surely take the reins of Stilt cuisine and steer it however they wished. They did not so desire or wish. Agate had made peace with this.

Mokou, too, seemed to make peace with this, or at least grew too absorbed in the subtle flavor spirals within the dish’s heat profile to press the matter further. The three of them ate in appreciative silence. Relative silence, at least. Tempting as it was to block out the clamor again, Agate’s sensitive hearing was better put towards listening for any angrier turns the crowds might take. This was nearly instinctual to her, though, leaving her intellect free to pursue other ends.

She turned her thoughts once more to the logistics of overland travel. With good fortune they could make Kitchen Heptagon in a week or less. With poor fortune, she still had enough contingencies to safeguard them to its sheltering walls.

“That armor lady,” began Mokou.

“The Wardens Esther?” Lulihart clarified.

“Yeah. She’s got a bunch of bodies, right?”

Lulihart nodded. “‘One rose is fair, five is death,’ as the vintners say. She tends not to summon her sisters unless there’s real trouble. She helps keep things civil in the Stilt.”

“Huh,” said Mokou. “Back where I come from, that kind of power made you a goddess. But here it’s only enough to what, resolve incidents?”

There was a strange sort of weight, or perhaps a subtle cultural disconnect, to the way she said “incidents.” Agate wasn’t certain what it could portend. Whether or not Lulihart picked up on it, they responded before Agate could press Mokou on it.

“Don’t think anybody’s tried calling Esther a goddess before,” Lulihart chuckled. “She’d probably break their kneecaps.”

“Sounds about right,” Mokou grunted.

By that point, all three of them had finished dinner. Lulihart unholstered a mouthpiece from the stem of the hookah and puffed out lazy coils of pipesmoke. Mokou sat back and chewed the sauce-soaked end of witchwood bark, her eyes dancing between unseen patterns in the smoke. Agate rose and cleared away the empty dishes, partially out of courtesy to her host and partially because she knew they were liable to stack up if her host was left to their own devices.

“Do you have a brush?” Lulihart asked Mokou. Their conversation filtered easily over to Agate.

“Oh yeah, I just got new ones. It was buy-one-get-one.”

“So you don’t just keep your hair like that on purpose!” Lulihart laughed. “Could I brush it? There’s so much of it and it hurts to see it like that.”

“Sure,” said Mokou. There was the sound of her rummaging in her pack, then the softer sounds of brushes through hair interspersed with the occasional grunt from Mokou when they reached a tangle.

“It’s nice here,” said Mokou after a time. Her voice was pitched such that she probably didn’t think Agate could hear her from the kitchen.

“Thank you,” said Lulihart. “I try.”

There was the soft noise of Mokou drawing in her own pull of smoke, then exhaling. “Sheba’s nice, too.”

“A kind soul, isn’t she?” Lulihart chuckled. “If she’s not sleeping, she’s probably sleeping.”

“You returned my books then, yes?” spoke Agate, returning from the kitchen.

“Yeah,” said Mokou, shifting out of her cushion and rising to face Agate. It seemed some resolution brewed within her. “Why’d you have to return them, though? If you wanted to work on your thing, I don’t know, I could wait around for a bit.”

“Mokou,” said Agate. She clapped a hand on her shoulder in a gesture of solidarity. “You assaulted the head of the main branch of the Mechanimist faith. This is not the time or occasion to wait around for a bit.”

Mokou flushed in anger. Her bruises already seemed less livid, perhaps owing to the witchwood. “He had it coming!”

“I would never doubt this,” said Agate, punctuating her statement with another pat to her shoulder. “But more zealous denizens of the Six-Day Stilt will not be so sympathetic. As ever, for our effort and grief we enlightened few are met only with torches and spineforks. Such is our burden.”

Mokou opened her mouth and paused. “The hell is a spinefork?”

“How do you think you harvest a ripe spinefruit when it’s in the middle of a fractus patch?” asked Lulihart.

Mokou glanced to Lulihart behind her, then back to Agate. She sighed heavily and looked away. Agate pushed Mokou, gently but firmly, back into the cushion, then turned away to search her hoversled for a rag to wipe her hands.

“Rest while you can,” she called over her shoulder. “We leave before dawn.”


	14. In Which Mokou Looks Like an Asshole

“I look like a fucking asshole,” said Mokou.

The suit Agate had made for her was bulkier than she was used to, especially around the reinforced shoulders and chest. It clung in strange places and didn’t breathe at  _ all. _ Spare banana clips and canteens dangled from straps down her chest. Slung over her back were a matte carbine from Agate and a pack for her spare clothes and sundries. An off-white hat with a wide brim promised to keep the sun from her head, while a heavy set of mirror-sheened sunglasses were poised to protect her eyes from glare. It was still dark out. She felt ludicrous.

“You look cool,” said Lulihart. Their sly smile hid a snicker. “You look really, really cool.”

Lulihart had woven Mokou’s hair into a rough, messy braid. Together they had worked a good portion of the tangles from its length, and Lulihart had even added a bit of scented oil. It made her slightly less worried about catching it on her new gun. She liked how it looked on her, but part of her was still self-conscious about it. Her main association with long white hair in a style like this was with the other Lunarian exile who had lived with Kaguya. Eirin. What had happened to her? There were so many Mokou had lost track of over the millennia.

If Kaguya saw her like this, she’d probably think Mokou looked desperate. She probably wouldn’t even be wrong.

“You look prepared for the Moghra’yi,” said Agate.

Mokou took a few steps to test her load and nearly fell over. “What the fuck did you do to my boots? They’re all springy now!”

“You complained of my speed. I have modified them to allow you to better keep pace. Furthermore, I have looped them into the reclamation mesh of your suit.”

“The  _ what?” _ Mokou lifted her arms out to her sides to better look down at the bulky suit she wore. “What is this thing? What did you put me in? What are all these tubes?”

“It is a paragon of desert survival gear. A recycling suit, known also as a stillsuit to the Issachari. It is designed to maximize capture of your body’s wastewater. Internal mechanical systems then filter and reclaim that wastewater back into potability. This is how you maximize every dram.”

There were several implications in Agate’s response that Mokou needed more time to fully grasp. She gestured plaintively at her own feet. “You don’t just fuck with a woman’s boots. Why did you have to do that?”

Agate scoffed and turned to her trailing sled. Her hooves clicked on the tile. “Do you realize how much moisture you lose through your feet? I have compensated for the deficiencies in your biology towards desert survival.”

“Fine, whatever,” grumbled Mokou. She fiddled with a tube that emerged near her collar. “No, wait. Wastewater. Like,  _ all _ wastewater?”

Lulihart grinned slyly from behind the mouthpiece of their hookah. “Beats running out of water. Live and drink piss.”

“Again, since  _ listening _ is beyond you, all contaminants are filtered from it,” said Agate. “Qud is not the place for an irrational sense of squeamishness.”

Mokou heaved a harsh sigh. “Look, I’ll try anything twice, but is this really necessary? I got more water from Sheba. It’s gotta be enough for the rest of the desert.”

“And beyond the desert? Where the canyons bleed tar? Where the rivers are choked with salt and worse? Where do you imagine you’ll find more fresh water to sustain you? Besides, it has other purposes.” At this, Agate turned from her hoversled sporting a single armored gauntlet. She flexed it into a fist. “I will now strike you in demonstration.”

“What? Okay.” Mokou squared up against the tinker and braced herself into a stable stance.

Agate cantered forward and heaved her armored fist at full force into Mokou’s chest. It drove the immortal back a few paces, gasping. She would have recovered, but the springs in her boot-heels fouled her steps. She landed heavily on her backside.

“Damn,” she hissed. “You got a fuckin’ arm on you.”

“You must learn how to move within it and take blows better. But tell me, how do you feel?” asked Agate, removing the gauntlet and shaking out her hand.

Mokou felt winded. But beyond that, almost miraculously, nothing. She’d taken more than her fair share of punches in her lifespan. It felt like this one wouldn’t even bruise. She lifted herself back up and adjusted her shades. “Fine, I guess.”

“This is because I have strategically reinforced this particular suit with panels of plastifer. It redistributes and dissipates force, provides protection against elemental effects, and can potentially stop small-arms fire.” Agate turned to leave. “Let us be off, before too many eyes are upon us.”

Agate strode to the plaza’s entrance at a relatively leisurely pace. Mokou fell in behind her, picking her steps carefully to accustom herself to her modified boots. Lulihart rose and saw them out. The three of them paused at the threshold for a brief farewell.

Lulihart took Agate’s hands in both pairs of their own and kissed her cheek on the non-fungal side. Something in the gesture finally forged a connection within Mokou’s thought processes. Agate’s fungus hadn’t sported that bite mark before Mokou left for the library. Hadn’t Lulihart been glowing when the warden marched her back? At the time, Mokou was too distracted by the pain and indignity to put two and two together. And here Agate was, acting like escorting her was such an imposition.

“Keep track of your gravity,” said Lulihart. Agate snorted and gave a sardonic smile in return. They turned next to Mokou and grasped her hands in turn. The gesture was warm, despite the chill of the desert night and the recycling gloves sheathing her hands. “Come back anytime,” they smiled.

Mokou smiled back. “I’d like to.”

“Live and drink, Mokou.”

“You too, Luli.”

“So familiar!” they tittered. They gave her hands one last squeeze and waved them off.

Agate led Mokou south through the Stilt’s quiet dirt streets. The shadows of tents, the looming outlines of spires, and the flickering light of campfires passed by them. It seemed the Wardens Esther had made good on her word, for no one accosted them. Still, they stuck to the most direct paths out of the city. Agate didn’t seem one to tempt fate.

It felt easier to keep up with her. The wide, uncrowded streets gave Mokou a chance to acclimate to the new stride her boots demanded. It was a matter of harnessing the burst of decompressive force into forward momentum. There was a rhythm to it, but missing the rhythm threatened to send the inertia of her body and the extra weight of her gear off into some disastrous new trajectory. It took more focus than she liked. Maybe she’d get used to it.

Then they were past the last of the campfires and into the dim moonlit wastes beyond. Silence enveloped them save for the crunch of hooves and the oiled slinking of spring-loaded soles. The holy city had passed from hypothetical into history within Mokou’s reckoning in not even the span of a day. It could have been a hallucination. She didn’t even get the chance to sample its breweries. Once more Moghra’yi swallowed her. This time, at least, she would not be so easily digested.

After walking for a time, she nearly collided with Agate as the hindren motioned for a halt. Agate had paused to kindle the electric lantern slung beneath her sled. The light was dimmed by Mokou’s shades, but it still cast a bubble of clear vision around the two of them. Something had come up on them in the darkness — or perhaps Agate had been aiming for it in the first place. It was a grand statue nearly four times Mokou’s height, its plinth buried in the salt pans. An eagle, or perhaps some other bird associated with rulership and authority, stylized in marble and rising from the desert with crumbling wings outstretched.

“Woah,” said Mokou, removing her shades and craning her head back to better take it in. “Big statue.”

Agate glanced back at Mokou. “It dates from the reign of Polyxes, the third Sultan of Qud. Mid-dynasty style, roughly 3850 BR. The most widely-accepted historical interpretation is that it was raised to commemorate the cartographical limits of her imperial expansion. Though, there are scattered accounts of other such statues of hers found deeper within the Moghra’yi.”

“BR?” asked Mokou. She was a bit surprised at how willing Agate was to expound on this topic. She was grateful for it, mainly because it gave her a chance to catch her breath. It was a cumbersome suit.

“Before Resheph — the last Sultan of Qud.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” said Mokou. “How long ago was that from now?”

Agate raised her eyebrows subtly. “The present year, my good hermit, is in all likelihood 1007 AR. After Resheph, that is.”

Mokou scoffed. “I’m not a — what do you mean ‘in all likelihood’?”

The hindren sighed. “We’re in the midst of a scholarly schism in regards to interpretations of the Reshephian calendar. This schism hinges upon whether or not one considers the Consortium’s Baccata Yewtarch a reputable historical source. We can at least approximate the changeover to be one thousand years ago, but there’s a margin of error of a decade or so.”

It was clear from her tone just how much that margin vexed her. Regardless, that made the statue almost five thousand years old. Where had Mokou been five thousand years ago? Stuck under a glacier, probably.

“The third sultan was a giant bird?” asked Mokou.

Agate crossed one arm across her stomach to prop up her other arm by the elbow. She pressed its fingertips into her temple, then flicked her hand forward by the wrist in a gesture of disbelief. “No! It is not a strict representation! Mid-dynasty depictions commonly stylized Polyxes as a bird of prey adorned by five jewels.”

Mokou blinked up at the statue. “So where are the jewels?”

“This close to the Stilt? Where do you think? Probably stashed in some high priest’s coffers or locked in some water baron’s vaults.” Agate turned her upraised palm to the statue and lifted it slightly to elaborate. “Note the depressions across the breast. They would have been faceted there.”

“Damn,” grunted Mokou. “Bet you could get a lot of water for one of those.”

“You’re several thousand years too late. Once, it was a monument to the ostentations of imperial authority. Now, another landmark for pilgrims and caravans.” Agate pawed a hoof at the ground and turned up the collar of her coat against the chill. “Are you recovered? We still have ground to cover to be out of sight of the Stilt by daybreak.”

“I guess,” said Mokou. She donned her shades once more, checked her load, and sighed. “This shit is heavy, you know.”

Agate had already resumed her stride. She lifted her voice without turning back. “Your gratitude is humbling.”

“Asshole,” Mokou mouthed. She set her face in a scowl and followed the hindren through the desert.


	15. Convalescent Hearty Honey Soup

There was only so much that a hat and a pair of sunglasses could do against the cruel disdain of the Moghra’yi. Mokou staggered in sidewinding switch-steps up the rise of a salt dune, following the fresh hoofprints up its side. The suit and the sun cooked her body. Her jumbled emotions and the throbbing witchwood hangover cooked her brain. She had fallen behind again. All she could feel about it was a simmering, impotent resentment. Nothing else could surface over the way her thighs and calves screamed at her. Every single bit of neglect she had compounded upon herself through her resurrections in the desert now needled its way out of her every muscle.

Why was she still doing this to herself? But she knew why. Across the desert was Kaguya. Keine wouldn’t have been happy to see her here, on this path. But Keine was gone. Mokou had already come this far.

She decided, halfway up the dune, that if she reached the top and saw more fucking hoofprints up more  _ fucking _ dunes, she would scream.

She reached the top. The dunes stretched out around her. The sky-splitting chrome needle to the east looked no closer than it ever had. Below it, a distant rim of canyon walls resolved in ghostly, wavering red over the horizon-spanning heat mirage. Was that the edge of the Moghra’yi? It was still several days away, it seemed. Hoofprints led down the far side of the dune and stopped in the depression before the next dune rose again.

There was a canopy down there, between the dunes. Sun-bleached canvas in mottled eggshell camouflage lifted between telescoping poles sunk into the salt. Beneath it, shade and the faint scent of food.

She didn’t scream. It was probably for the best. It hurt to breathe.

Mokou picked her way down the dune, half sliding and half stumbling. By the time she reached the bottom she had already slung her pack and carbine from her back. She laid them down beneath the canopy mid-stride and dropped to her knees in the shade, then twisted around mid-fall to land on her back.

It was cooler here. The shelter had been raised for long enough that the salt beneath her wasn’t quite scalding. Her eyes adjusted to the sparse gloom. There was a small fan under the peak of the canopy providing a bit of extra relief from the heat. Various camp fixtures shared the shade with her. Her breathing steadied.

“If you need to empty the suit,” said Agate, busying herself somewhere in Mokou’s periphery, “I would recommend you do so into a new canteen.”

“What?” breathed Mokou.

“Assuming you haven’t been topping yourself up from its reservoirs, they fill from extended use. You will need to empty them periodically.”

“I thought it was clean,” said Mokou. The fan spun softly above her. Every little draft it sent down was a blessing.

“Yes,” said Agate. Something she was working on hissed. “The taste, however, is another matter.”

Mokou grunted. She had been trying not to consider the taste until she had to, but it wasn’t surprising. Maybe by the time she had to break out the recycled water the taste would fade. She sat up at last and unhooked an empty canteen from her chest.

“Where do I—?” She patted along her suit’s panels.

“A zipper on your left side, below your ribs. Inside is a valve with a pump toggle.”

Mokou found it as directed and soon had it emptying into the canteen.

“Stillsuit travel demands a certain discipline,” Agate continued. “You have done well enough, for a novice. We made adequate progress today.”

“Great,” Mokou muttered. Did the hindren expect her to do  _ better _ come nightfall? With how her legs were feeling, she’d be lucky if she could stand. The suit shuddered subtly around her as its reservoirs emptied. The pump switched itself off. Mokou pushed it back into the pouch and zipped it away. “How the hell did you turn four guns into  _ this?” _

“Anyone could, with the proper grasp of the material and mechanical underpinnings of the devices in question.” Agate turned from her portable camp-kitchen carrying the meal in a pair of tin bowls. “But to the extent that I have modified your stillsuit, your carbine, your boots and your mirrorshades, the guns alone were insufficient. I had to dip into my locker’s reserves.”

“Oh,” said Mokou. “Why go to all the trouble?”

Agate flicked an ear and settled herself down facing Mokou before passing her a bowl. “I do not pay favors in half-measures. A friend and colleague vouches for your talent in spite of your suicidal fixation. Remember that it is the weight of this trust that staves off your inevitable death. Please comport yourself accordingly.”

Mokou hardly heard over the growling of her stomach. In the bowl was a chilled stew of tender, shredded goat meat and preserved vegetables, all topped with toasted, salted seeds. The broth was thick and flavorful, centered around honey and savory spices. When she tasted it, it fizzed in her mouth as though it was carbonated. The taste was familiar, but the combined texture was unlike anything she had tried before. She wanted more. It felt like exactly what she needed after a long day of walking.

“This is medicinal cuisine, right?” asked Mokou.

“Yes,” said Agate. There was a hint of surprise in her voice at Mokou’s identification. “It’s best not to take chances with glotrot. This dish will discourage it from taking root.”

“Really damn good,” said Mokou. Agate still didn’t believe in Mokou’s immunity to diseases — another effect of the Elixir — but Mokou didn’t particularly care enough to explain it again to someone who wouldn’t listen. The meal’s quality made it easy not to care. The flavor profile held within it an echo of ancient cultural techniques that tickled her reminiscence without the usual burdensome melancholy. It reminded her of Keine’s cooking, in a way. Her wife had kept a few medicinal recipes in her repertoire. “How does it stay so cold, but so tender?”

“You are familiar with the process of cold fusion?” asked Agate.

“Cold fusion?” Mokou cocked her head as the phrase jogged something within her. After a certain point,  _ everything _ started to sound familiar. She had to cobble so many concepts together from out of long tunnels of approximation. Finally she remembered. That was the passion project of that one god from the mountain, back in the land she’d shared with Keine. The god’s name escaped her. “That’s one of the technologies that come from the gods, right? I remember it’s good for boiling water.”

Agate’s reply choked off in her chest. She pressed her fingers to the bridge of her cervine nose and took several deep breaths. “No,” she said at last. “Regardless, the foundations are similar to the process which I used in this dish. It’s been cold-stewing in a modified neutron cooker while we journeyed today.”

“You’ll have to show me,” said Mokou.

“Will I?” Agate replied.

Mokou said nothing, but kept eating before the dish got warm. Now that she had the time and focus to do so, she finally noticed the toll that desert travel took upon Agate as well. It was nothing particularly dramatic in isolation — sweat stains on her shirt, salt-dust on her flanks, the faint rosy buffing of windburn on her exposed cheek — but each was a crack in her untouchable facade.

Mokou finished her meal and tapped her chest. “Hey, leg situation aside — if these suits are so great, how come you’re not wearing one?”

Agate took Mokou’s empty plate, rose, and ticked a cold smile. “Firstly, I have better and less cumbersome protection. Secondly, I am situated such that I needn’t concern myself over every dram.”

Mokou shot her an incredulous look before she remembered she was still wearing a pair of heavy sunglasses. “So, what, you couldn’t just spot me if I run low?”

Agate’s smile flickered out instantly and she turned away to busy herself with the dishes at a camp station. “You are foreign to our lands, yes?”

“Yeah,” said Mokou. “Thought it was pretty obvious.”

“What you have asked is  _ incredibly _ personal,” Agate explained. “Furthermore, the  _ way _ you have asked it could, in the wrong circumstances, result in you being exiled from polite society for attempted banditry.”

“Touchy!” Mokou scoffed. “It’s just money. The fuck good is it if you don’t spread it around?”

“Water has a weight, culturally, beyond being merely a medium of economic exchange. Here in Qud it is held as sacred. Surely you, with your talk of gods and spirits, can grasp this.”

“If that’s the line, fine,” said Mokou. “Just wasn’t clear to me why.”

Agate finished her cleaning, then leaned her hands on the folding table in front of her. Her posture was tense. “I did not ask to share this road with you. My scrap, my food, my shelter, my techniques — all these are demanded from me. You would have my water, next?” She turned at last and gestured sweepingly around the shelter, from canvas to hoversled. “This is my home! You are in it!”

Mokou sighed and drew her legs in before her, resting her hands on her thighs. She knew, intimately, how it felt to have no fixed location and nothing more but what she could carry with her. She was in it, even now. It made everything that much more tenuous. That tenuousness had killed her many times. She bowed her head slightly. “Sorry for the trouble, Agate. And any offense. Thanks for the food.”

Agate stared at her for a silent moment. Did her expression soften at all? Difficult to say. Her ear flicked. “Save your apology until you have water enough to bathe. We set off again at dusk.”


	16. Dragon Scale

Agate had to credit her charge for finally keeping up better. Today’s camp was easier to set up. It was a common wayfarer’s stopover a half-day from the edge of the desert. Countless travelers over the decades had worn a campground into the lee of a grand marble statue — yet another of Qud’s innumerable relics of sultanic authority. Agate had barely lifted the canvas shelter when Mokou came puffing over the last dune. She looked bedraggled, but less so than Agate had come to expect over the last two days. Perhaps she would even be in a state to cook, for a change.

Mokou slowed her pace to take in the statue looming over the camp, then froze.

“Fuck!” she shouted.

Agate ignored this outburst. Her companion was clearly not imperiled, and there were more fixtures to unpack from her sled.

“You’re fucking kidding me! Fuck!” Mokou shouted, again. She pulled off her hat and ran a hand back through her bangs.

“What is it?” Agate sighed.

Mokou pointed directly at the statue. “That’s her!” 

Agate stepped out from under the shade and craned her neck up to take in the statue. Marble teased into the shape of a seated woman, a sultan. Wide sleeves slipped coyly from her forearm as a hand braced her chin. Her brooding stone gaze leveled off to the west, Stiltwards. Some unknown hand had wrought forth a classical beauty from the stone, a beauty that yet resisted the indignity of time and the elements.

“Polyxes?” asked Agate. “Yes, it’s her again. Late dynasty style, less prone to flights of abstraction. After a military defeat, a faction of her advisors counseled that she abdicate. Historical sources diverge slightly in regards to her reaction — some maintain she calmly explained the error of their position before taking a brief sabbatical, while others claim she killed them by trapping them inside of extradimensional jewels. Either way, she did not abdicate at that time. This statue was raised in commemoration of her continued reign.”

Mokou scuttled closer, her weariness seemingly forgotten. “No,” she hissed, and pointed again.  _ “That’s Kaguya.” _

A sinking dread filtered through Agate. The dread of standing upon a precipice. She turned a clinical gaze to Mokou. Breathing heavily, but not abnormally. No sign of glotrot, as expected. Agate reached forward and lifted her shades to inspect her pupils and found them in healthy focus. She placed a hand on her forehead to check for fever. Running a bit hot.

“Lay off!” Mokou sputtered and pushed Agate’s hands away.

Agate stepped back a pace and returned to the task of setting up camp. “Come to the shade. Have you been hydrating adequately?

“Yes!” said Mokou, clearly insulted. “I’d know her anywhere, goddammit. It’s her.”

“Mokou,” said Agate. “I am going to set up the kitchen. It is your turn to cook.”

“Wh—” Mokou’s expression soured further. “I wish you’d told me that last night. Could’ve started something in that fancy cooker of yours.”

“Are you trained in neutronic cuisine?” Agate asked. “Until such time as you are, you do not touch it. Regardless, Irula spoke highly of your fundamentals. Show me the skill I am shepherding to the Heptagon. You may use my ingredients.” She retrieved her burner from the sled and set it up near the firepit but still within the shade. “Tell me of this Kaguya, if you wish.”

“No, one thing at a time,” Mokou replied. She stepped into the shade and popped her neck. “I could give a shit about geometry. I’m cooking for me. You got any dumpling paper?”

Agate placed down a portable prep table and extended its wings. “I have dreadroot flour, if you wish to make dough.”

“Sure. You got pork? Alliums? Eggs? Frying oil?” She strode to the hoversled and began appraising it for cooking implements.

“Boar meat, stunions, dawnglider eggs, and yes.” Agate withdrew the requested ingredients and, because few could grasp her storage philosophy, a wok and several utility knives to save time.

“Boar? Fancy, but close enough,” Mokou nodded. “You got soap? My hands have been stewing in here for  _ days.” _

“I thought you’d never ask,” said Agate. It was a small spark of relief against the lingering dread. The abyss still yawned beyond the present task, unspoken.

Mokou detached the gloves from her suit and scrubbed her hands. This done, she picked up a knife and gave it a quick twirl between her fingers before starting to mince the boar meat. “Let me see your spices,” she said.

Agate twisted a handle on her hoversled and extracted its spice rack with the reverence of a nuclear fuel rod. She set it on the table for Mokou’s perusal. Agate could find no fault in Mokou’s knifework, but knifework alone wouldn’t cut it. It was one’s grasp of spices that truly separated chef from chaff.

Mokou slid the minced boar into a mixing bowl and spun through the rack, looking at the labels and occasionally opening jars to sniff their contents. She cast cagy glances back at Agate, then finally spoke. “You want to start on the dough or do you want us both to be hungry for longer?”

So, she could delegate, too. This was a sign of promise. “Then these would be my dumplings as well, would they not?”

“Okay?” Mokou shrugged, then started to peel the stunions. “I’m fucking hungry, why do you want to make this a test?”

Agate merely nodded and set to work mixing the dough. Mokou sniffed as she started mincing — most likely from the allium compounds, but Agate wouldn’t discount the possibility she’d fallen prey to some unspoken emotional compromise. She claimed not to be a hermit, yet every hermit Agate had ever known had been fascinated by the history of the Third Sultan. This seemed to have blown past fascination and into fixation. Polyxes was nearly five thousand years dead and entombed. Long enough for insular and hostile hermit cults to accrete around her memory in jewel-veined temple-mines deep in the mountains. Mokou didn’t seem to be one of these — she was merely sullen, not hostile.

Mokou pierced the leathery hide of a dawnglider egg and took in the scent of the yolk. “Damn, even the eggs are spicy,” she said, with a tone of undisguised excitement. “What else do you have with a kick to it?”

Agate paused in her kneading and moved to the burner. She slotted out the bulky power cell and placed it upon Mokou’s workspace, then opened the cell’s storage tank. Heat roiled out. “How’s this?”

Mokou looked dully down at the molten rock swirling within the thermoelectric cell’s reservoir, then back at Agate. “That’s lava.”

“Not to your taste?” asked Agate. She couldn’t resist a faint smile.

“No, I’m not about to eat molten rock. What the hell is wrong with you? What else do you have?”

“It’s not out the question, with the proper conditioning,” said Agate, sealing the cell once more and slotting it back in the burner. She beckoned her hoversled and withdrew several jars. “Try these. In order of heat: fire ant gaster paste, sauced flamebeard gland, congealed blaze, and sauced elder flamebeard gland.”

Mokou opened the jar of fire ant paste and dipped a finger inside to taste it. “Ooh, it’s got a tang to it.”

Agate recoiled. “Hold,” she said, mastering herself before any further violation could be visited upon the other jars. She spooned out a sample from each onto the cutting board, cleaning the spoon between each dollop.

Mokou watched her with evident disbelief. “What,” she said, less as a question and more as a provocation.

“These are my ingredients. I will brook no cross-contamination,” said Agate.

“You can’t let yourself get hung up on the little things,” said Mokou. “It’s all going to the same place eventually. Dust. It’s all just gonna be dust.” She tasted each of the remaining samples. The elder flamebeard sauce brought her to tears. “Fuck yes,” she croaked. “That’s so hot. Fuck yes. Do you have any shoyu?”

“Shoyu?” asked Agate. Another word from beyond Qud.

“Maybe tamari? Soy? Soy beans? Turn ‘em into a sauce and ferment it a bit? Real salty.” There was a pleading edge to her voice.

“Yes, we have those,” said Agate. “The preparation may be different than you’re accustomed to, but I have some soy sauce somewhere in here.”

Mokou heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank god. You didn’t let soy die. At least there’s  _ one _ thing in this meal that isn’t a substitution.”

With her ingredients gathered and her filling mixed, there was little else to do but cook. The dough was rolled thin, trimmed around spoonfuls of filling, folded and crimped into sharp little crescents, and fried. Heedless of the spattering oil, Mokou plucked them from the wok. She used a pair of thin sticks of whittled bone she had crafted for herself during the breaks in their last few days of travel. She made two dozen dumplings in all, heaped in a sizzling, golden-brown pile on a wide plate with — on Agate’s insistence — separate bowls of dipping sauce for each of them.

“Gyoza!” said Mokou, then winked. “Or gyoze enough, eh?”

It seemed to be some mangled attempt at wordplay, unworthy of its subject. The dumplings themselves — gyoza, evidently — were astonishingly good. Savory, crispy, fatty, with a unifying heat profile between the eggs in the filling and the gaster in the dipping sauce.

“You went with the gaster after all?” asked Agate.

“It’s the tang,” answered Mokou. “Anything else would’ve just stolen focus.”

Agate nodded and had another. “Irula’s faith in your talents was not misplaced,” she said at last. It was perhaps self-evident in the face of the meal, but she felt it worth voicing regardless. Not as a compliment, but as an observation of fact.

Mokou pointed at her with her bone utensils and narrowed her eyes triumphantly. “I don’t fuck around about dumplings.”

Agate snorted. “Clearly not.”

A few more gyoza, accounted between them. Agate sensed her traveling companion mulling over a statement and again felt the precipice.

“Houraisan Kaguya,” said Mokou, at last. “Where to even start?”

Agate said nothing, but gave her the space to begin.

Mokou took a deep breath and leaned back subtly, looking up into space somewhere beyond the canvas over them. Beyond the sky itself. “She’s a princess from the moon.”

And now they were over the precipice. Agate’s heart sank. Such clear-eyed and level delusion! Had the fire she felt on this one’s brow been that of the sun, or that of the moon? Clearly, Agate had worried herself over the wrong illness.

“Let me guess,” said Agate. “You seek her hand in troth to claim your throne as Moon King.”

“What? No,” said Mokou. “We’ve tried that a few times. It never works out.”

“Then perhaps you wish to usurp her position through conquest,” Agate suggested.

“I don’t know,” said Mokou, reasserting her customary scowl. “Look, don’t ask me what I’m gonna do when I find her. I’ll think of something. She doesn’t even have a throne up there anymore. She was exiled before I was even born. I don’t even know that the Lunarian Empire still exists.”

Agate gestured to the statue’s plinth, gleaming in the oppressive sun. “Assuredly, she has no throne. If that’s the woman you seek, she’s been dead for four thousand, eight hundred and nineteen years, give or take a decade. Her sultanate was passed down and picked clean several times over before Resheph finally dissolved it a thousand years ago!”

“She’s immortal, chief,” Mokou retorted.

What had happened here? How had this hagiographical obsession metastasized within this woman’s mind? What had shaped it into such a torturously convoluted personal mythology in flagrant disregard of the historical record? What cruel machinations of nature or fate had seeded this burgeoning culinary talent with Moon King Fever?

But then, was it truly? She had only partially denied any feverish designs upon the lunatic throne. Perhaps it was still incubating. Perhaps it could be staved off.

“Do you—” Agate clasped a hand before her lips momentarily to marshall her question. “Are you under the impression that the Moon Stair connects to the actual moon, physically?”

“I don’t know, does it?” said Mokou. “Be just like her to leave me down here. Wait, that big shining tower out there, is  _ that _ the Moon Stair?”

“That is the Spindle,” said Agate. “The Moon Stair is further past it, east and south. Neither connect to the moon.”

“There’s a good chance she’s still around, then.” Mokou sank her fist into her open palm in a gesture of dogged determination. “She was  _ here.” _

This was a tragedy. Perhaps Irula would have reconsidered their request had they known they would be saddling Agate with a Moon King.

She did not hear, high above them, the rustle of wind through feathers until those feathers were already tucked against scale in a predatory dive. Her body reacted first. She surged upright and sprang backwards, out of the shade.

“Scatter!” cried Agate.

A dawnglider tore through the canvas and landed on the empty dumpling platter in a pouncing coil. After a moment of hissing confusion, it started to gout flames all around itself. Agate was already clear. Mokou was slower. Her cries of pain and alarm rang over the flames.

“Your gun!” Agate called. She looked up to find four more dawngliders circling high above the camp, waiting for a target. One started another dive towards her. She closed her grasp around the hilt of her vibroblade and primed her force bracelet.

The diving dawnglider gouted flames at her just before impact. Agate sparked her bracelet. A latticed bubble of solidified energy sprang up around her. The flames washed over the bubble, then its lattice flared as the dawnglider collided with it. The dawnglider recoiled in a daze. Agate snapped off her bracelet and pounced forward. Her blade slipped effortlessly through scale and speared the serpent through the heart with a single thrust.

Mokou burst from under the shelter in a rolling skirmish with the first dawnglider. Its body coiled furiously around her while she held its fangs at bay with a hand around its neck. Was she trying to punch it? Every strike of hers seemed augmented by flaming talons. Finally she tore it away from herself and hurled it to the ground, where it slithered away desperately.

“Fuck this!” Mokou shouted. She sprang from the ground and, somehow,  _ kept rising. _ Fire wreathed around her as she ascended. Her climb leveled at the heart of the wheeling dawngliders still overhead. She loosed a wordless howl of rage that echoed across the salt dunes. The flames swirling around her erupted into an inferno. Wings of fire unfurled around her, shimmering and hungry. For a moment it was as though the Moghra’yi had gained a second sun. It was beautiful, terrifying.

And so, so, stupid.

“They’re immune to fire!” Agate cried over the flames. She doubted Mokou could hear her.

The raging vortex disrupted the thermals the dawngliders rode. Their hunting formation scattered in disarray. They flapped away over the dunes. Mokou’s flames subsided. She sank once more to the salt pans. Thick smoke rose from her shoulders. Somehow, she still had all her hair.

“Still got it!” Mokou cackled. Her eyes shone with a frenzied energy. A flame danced over her palm before she banished it with a flick. “Hey, you got one!”

“You would have as well, if you had simply  _ used your gun.” _ Agate wicked the blood from her blade into a vial. She sheathed the blade, stowed the vial, then bent to retrieve the dead serpent for butchery. “You cannot harm a dawnglider with fire alone. Their physiology renders them immune to it.”

“Still scared ‘em off pretty good. Fireproof, though? Shit. How was I supposed to know that?” Her enthusiasm flagged slightly.

“Their own flames weren’t clue enough? I would have assumed, being a high-level pyrokinetic yourself, you would have a better grasp of the inherent flammability of things. A telekinetic too, it seems.”

“What?” said Mokou. “This isn’t psionics, chief. This is pure application. The esoteric arts.  _ Magic.” _

Agate tossed the dawnglider corpse onto a clear table the struggle had spared. Her heart still pounded from the bloodshed. “Call it what you like.”

“This is a discipline!” said Mokou, stretching her arms wide. The last wisps of smoke escaped her suit’s surface. “Anyone can learn it if you’ve got a decade or two! Thought you were all about disciplines.”

This was beyond a tragedy. This was a nightmare. This was raw power bending inevitably into and through the lens of delusion. A landmine primed to burst on every poor bastard between her and the fever-throne until something finally burst back harder. She had slipped well past the bounds of predictability and now caromed out there along an unknown vector, backed by an unknown force. How many people would that force crash into?

“We aren’t done talking about this,” said Agate. “Now, are you butchering, or are you fixing the tent?”


	17. Shared Thirst

A dream of a memory, or a memory like a dream. Curling stacked terraces of glass and neon, concrete and plaster, hollowed out from the earth. Honeycombed storefronts along them, hawking unfamiliar things. Humming bursts of tongues she’d forgotten or never learned, swirls of folk in shapes alien and familiar. One of thousands of commercialities just like it in this world that had swallowed them after the sky broke. And Kaguya ahead of her, gliding through the crowds in prismatic elegance.

It hadn’t gone like this, had it? That nameless subterrene market, hadn’t it been cool and dark? Why was it so bright, so hot? Had she followed, then? Hadn’t they been side by side?

She saw herself outside herself in this fragment of long ago.

“We lost M______,” she said. A name she shouldn’t have forgotten, erased before it left her tongue.

Kaguya glanced back, her expression empty.

“Just fucking melted,” she continued. “Like — like she was foam. Couldn’t hold herself together anymore.”

“Do you blame me?” said Kaguya. Had she said that?

The terraces peeled away above and around them. They stood in an atrium, now. Too much light glared down from above. The fountain here hadn’t been dry. Kaguya faced her. She brushed a lustrous strand of hair behind an ear.

“It’s your fault,” she said to Kaguya. She had said that.

Kaguya laughed. Crystalline notes in the stifling light.

“You can’t blame me for the war,” said Kaguya. “They would have started it anyway. You know how wars are.”

“It’s your fault.” Clenched fists, pounding bile.

It wasn’t the war. It wasn’t everyone she’d lost in it and everyone she’d lost after it. They were going to start it anyway.

It was that she had to be alive, at all, to see it. To see any of it, and any of the days and days and days to come, any of the centuries behind her. If only Kaguya had never existed, she’d have died when she was supposed to have. She wouldn’t have become this perpetual exile from the wheel of life and death.

Kaguya smiled at her and her heart twisted. In her too-perfect face, amusement, lurid anticipation.

“Are you going to attack me again?”

She could have killed her then. She hadn’t. The light swallowed them both.

Mokou woke. The sun hung low over the dunes. Sunset pressed her shadow against the plinth. The tent was already down and packed. Kaguya, in stone above her, looked off and away to the west. Shortly it would be cool enough to travel.

“Tonight we reach the end of the Moghra’yi,” said Agate. “We may find ranches or farms in the canyons beyond where we could seek lodging or provisions.”

Something in her tone and her regard had changed. There had always been a distance, but now it seemed compounded by a deeper sentiment — resignation? Pity? Fear? She had never believed Mokou, but now it seemed the hindren had found a deeper conclusion to draw towards her. And that conclusion was  _ wrong.  _ It was built upon the denial and negation of things Mokou had lived through countless times over.

If Agate wanted to be wrong about her, nothing Mokou could tell her would change that. It was infuriating, but at the same time, almost liberating. She didn’t have to care.

They ate a quick and perfunctory meal for the trail. The canyon walls to the east blazed in crimson before the sun dipped below the rim of the desert. They set off towards them.

Red sands swirled into the salt underfoot in greater proportion, as though the desert corroded. Dunes turned to hills. Salt gusts whipped around them as light faded and the temperature fell. The storm was grittier, this close to the desert’s edge. Mokou adjusted her mask and followed the lantern’s light through the whirling poison.

Then it subsided with the true onset of night. A parting kiss from the Moghra’yi.

The hills rose subtly around them. They flowed up towards the striated canyon walls, gleaming ahead in the moonlight. They climbed a long-dry wash. Against its south rise, the lantern’s light flowed over a clump of palest green. Some nameless weed, struggling against the salt and severity. Mokou paused in her step. It was the first growing thing she’d seen since the Stilt. She hunched down for a closer look.

Agate halted her own stride, hearing Mokou pause. She glanced back, and continued to wait.

“What’s the Moghra’yi’s tendency out here?” asked Mokou. She crouched over the weed in contemplation.

“Tendency?” asked Agate.

“Growing or shrinking?”

“Shrinking. According to the last five-year study from Joppa, during that time the desert has ceded roughly one twelfth of a parasang to the watervine marshes along its southeastern limit.”

Mokou tipped out a dram of water for the weed, then rose. She looked back to the west, over the dunes behind them and the flats beyond, gleaming silver and cold. She pointed out to the moonlit horizon.

“Out on the far western end, it’s growing. Part of what pushed me out here.” She quenched herself from her canteen while she had it out. She strapped it to her chest again and turned back to Agate. “Guess it’s just moving along, too.”

Agate gave her an unreadable look with the piercing intensity she’d come to expect. Mokou had known many gazes like that — calculating but self-assured. One of the few things she found herself looking forward to was seeing Agate’s reaction once she finally realized how badly she’d miscalculated her. But then, whether Mokou could even stomach her until that time, if it ever arrived, was another consideration entirely.

“Tell me of the lands beyond the Moghra’yi,” said Agate. She waited for Mokou to draw up next to her.

Mokou shot her a beleaguered look. Now she wanted to listen? “Thought speaking wasted precious moisture.”

“You seem determined to waste it over sentimentality and I can spare my own expense. Besides, we have nearly passed through the Moghra’yi. The canyons and climes beyond require less strenuous stillsuit discipline.” Agate even seemed to be slowing her pace to match Mokou’s. “Did you pass through Athenreach?”

“Oh, man, those people are  _ assholes,” _ grunted Mokou. “Not a place to settle down. I only stuck around long enough to steal enough to keep moving. Spent a little more time around Oth.”

“They must have valued your prowess,” said Agate.

“I’m telling you, it ain’t psionics,” Mokou said. She shrugged. “All it ended up being down there was a different flavor of asshole.”

“Surely you are capable of more trenchant insight than this,” Agate sighed. “Anything at all that could challenge or support the Baccata Yewtarch’s collations of hearsay?”

Mokou scoffed back at her. “I’m working my way there, alright? It’s a long walk.”

They left the desert behind and climbed into Qud.


	18. Nature of Violence

Mokou pushed herself out from under a mound of slain pigflesh. Her chest throbbed where the beast had tried to gore her through the suit. She popped the spent magazine from her carbine and fished at her gear straps for a fresh one.

“Why are there so many goddamn boars here?” she panted.

“Why wouldn’t there be?” Agate replied. The air along the barrel of her pistol shimmered as it vented excess heat. She was otherwise untouched — the boar had gone after Mokou instead. “The canyons accumulate nutrients washed down from the plateaus. Their ecosystems can support far more creatures than the Moghra’yi.”

“Well, sure,” said Mokou. She groaned and rolled out her shoulders. “But there’s far more and then there’s like, thirty to fifty blood-crazed hogs per goddamn parasang. This carbine’s good for that, at least.”

“About that,” Agate sniffed. “I do appreciate that you have reattached the suppressor I provided, but try to be more frugal in your use of ammunition. I would rather not bog down camp time with reloading.”

“That’s not my style,” said Mokou. Why would she shoot  _ fewer _ bullets?

“What, pray tell,  _ is _ your style?”

Mokou racked the slide of her rifle. “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. We gonna butcher this thing or what?”

Agate glanced up behind Mokou and her expression tightened. “Best not.”

A wooden arrow thunked into the grass a few paces from Mokou. Cackling laughter echoed along the shale walls. Mokou whirled to face the source.

Halfway up the canyon’s northern face was a wide, walkable layer where rockfall made for natural cover. Several hyena-like creatures in furs and leathers stood in front of the rocks with bows trained and arrows nocked. More furry heads poked up from behind cover. A more muscular one stood atop the largest boulder, still giggling. Her shoulders were draped in battered chainmail and she’d fashioned a helmet from a strangely-shaped skull. Her fur was dyed a garish pink where it wasn’t splashed in old bloodstains. She held up a fist in a gesture of readiness.

_ “you food?” _ the warlord barked.

“You little fuckers!” Mokou growled. She called up flames to wreath herself.

“Let it go,” cautioned Agate. “It’s not worth the effort.”

Mokou glanced back over her shoulder at Agate. “They shot an arrow at me!”

“Of course they did, they live here!” said Agate. “If you insist on fighting every snapjaw just for enforcing their own territorial claims, we’ll be here for weeks.”

The snapjaw leader cackled louder upon seeing Mokou’s fiery mantle. She made a sweeping gesture and her own set of flames sprung across the arrowheads of her waiting archers.

“I’ll have no part in this. They’d be satisfied if we just leave them the boar, you know,” sighed Agate. She turned and began to walk away, further along the canyon.

Several more snapjaws emerged from behind the cover of the fallen boulders. The leader reached to a holster on her back and unslung a battered shotgun, then pumped the action. The mechanical sound echoed harshly down to the canyon floor.

Mokou considered this. According to Agate, her recycling suit could stop small-arms fire. Or rather, could  _ potentially _ stop small-arms fire. 

She decided she’d rather not get shot. She pointed to her eyes, her glare hidden behind her shades, then pointed to the leader. She backed around the boar carcass with a deliberate unhurriedness. As she caught up to Agate, gales of laughter echoed after her from the canyon walls. She let her flames gutter out, but she still seethed internally.

“Slaying local leaders will do little to ease our passage through the canyons,” said Agate. “In the vast majority of confrontations, one can simply  _ leave.” _

Mokou scoffed. It did nothing to improve her mood that her traveling companion insisted on treating her like an imbecile. Of course she knew how to disengage, but she still had  _ pride. _ She ignored Agate’s overbearing lecturing to sate her own curiosity.

“Those critters — snapjaws? What are they?”

Agate’s ears flicked, perhaps in irritation or perhaps to maintain vigilant awareness of their surroundings. “One of Qud’s more populous mutant clades, common in the canyons, hills, and mountains. They tend to subsist on hunting, scavenging, and petty banditry, though some less insular organizations among them will found villages for the purposes of trade and agriculture. Interlopers as we are, the primary threat posed to us by snapjaws lies in their numbers.”

“Kinda like fairies, then?” asked Mokou.

“What on earth are you talking about?” Agate replied.

“We had ‘em all over, where I used to live. Petty nature spirits, mostly harmless until something got ‘em riled up. Then you’d just have to mow ‘em down until whatever was riling them up stopped.”

Agate fixed her a perturbed look. “What a tremendously depersonalized and violent response.”

“It’s not like they could really die!” Mokou protested. “They’d just come back in a day or so. Some of ‘em even thought it was fun.”

“We do not have ‘fairies’ in Qud. When people die here — barring specific infrastructural outliers — they do not  _ come back.” _

“Lucky them,” Mokou muttered.

Agate’s stare shifted past perturbed and into harrowed. “Those snapjaws, above all else, are  _ people. _ Violent, territorial, obnoxious, yes, but still  _ people. _ They have as much right to exist as any of us. Why am I explaining this? Why must I explain this to you?”

Clearly, she just loved the sound of her own voice too much. Mokou bared her teeth in a confrontational grin. “I come back, you know.”

“Are you a fairy, then? Where do you find the time to fit it in between being a hermit and the King of the Moon?”

“I’m sick of your fucking attitude is what I am,” Mokou growled.

“If your philosophy towards your own violence is so brittle that it cannot stand under critique—”

“Oh my god, do you ever shut up? That last bit wasn’t even critique!” Mokou planted her hands on her chest in a plaintive gesture. “I can’t fucking die!”

Anger played across Agate’s expression before settling into a dubious sort of pity. Her grip on the hilt of her vibroblade loosened. “You test the limits of what I consider a favor.”

“You don’t believe me.” Mokou practically spat it. “You’ll see.”

“I would rather not,” said Agate. She turned her gaze forward and pulled ahead once more. “If you want to sleep in a bed tonight, follow me.”


	19. Shale and Spore

They climbed a canyon wash carved through the stone by time itself, exposing strata to the evening light. Timeless sandstone and shale, struck through with gleaming layers of fossil and chrome — ancient life and industry compacted into the earth itself. But it was alive, too. After the desert, the verdancy around them almost overwhelmed. Vines bridged layers of stone with streamers of thorns and blossoms. Rust-hued flora chewed their way out of and along the rock to wave in the gentle breeze. Wind and growth and perhaps even rain abraded the canyon walls into the soil beneath their feet, and from that soil scrubs and grasses and trees sprouted. The trees — some with twisting thorns and oily foliage, some buzzing with sheltered insects, some unseasonably sprouting hard little fruits, some filling the air around them with swooning spice. Those last must have been witchwood trees.

Mokou owed the opportunity to take in the life and scenery around her to the fact that it was a more sedate stretch of canyon. Oversized dragonflies and crows possessed of an inner radiance flitted above the sparse canopies. Horses — freakishly muscular but thankfully peaceful — grazed under the shelter of the greenery in small gatherings. Large crimson salamanders clung to outcroppings in the canyon walls to soak in the last rays of the day. The peace was a relief after the day’s procession of unrelenting and hostile boars. It would have made for a pleasant walk in better company.

Since the confrontation with the snapjaw warband, silence had fallen between the two of them and had lingered for several hours. That was its own sort of relief, but Mokou still found herself stuck trailing behind Agate. How close had they come to blows? Mokou almost wished she had pushed her provocation harder. Perhaps then they wouldn’t be simmering in this false peace.

Dusk lengthened. Shadows pooled deeper about them with every gradual bend in the canyon. The caps of the walls blazed above them before the last traces of daylight slipped from stone back into sky. Around another bend, the canopy’s silhouettes thickened ahead. Amongst the dark shapes growing against the sky there now stood some of a less arboreal nature. The soil grew softer and vaguely spongier beneath them.

“Hold,” said Agate. She paused to kindle the lantern of her hoversled. Pallid trunks loomed at the edge of its cast light — giant fungal growths rivaling the stunted trees in size. Agate strode towards the nearest fungus, stopped several paces away, then gestured to it. “Keep your distance from this sort.”

Mokou took a few steps closer for a better look. She stopped a pace further from it than Agate stood. It was tall enough that the underside of its conical cap was clearly visible. In the lantern’s light, the fungus seemed almost to breathe. Subtle shudders played along its gills in rippling compression patterns. Glittering emerald spores danced and drifted beneath the cap, drawn up and pushed back down by the rhythm of the gills. The whole structure looked primed to burst.

Mokou pulled her mask on. Its heavy cloth had fared well enough against the Moghra’yi’s saltstorms; perhaps it could stave off spores as well. “Poison?”

Agate glanced back. Her glowcrust cast its own light into the gloom. “Only mildly. It’s more a matter of quantity and aftereffect. If you’d like a fungal colony of your own, then by all means approach a broodpuff. Considering your hygiene, it would be quite a healthy one.”

“That’s all?” Mokou grunted and lowered her mask again. It probably wouldn’t take. She was yet to meet the fungus that could work its way past the Hourai Elixir. “Had ones back in Gensokyo that could put you to sleep for years, or send you into toxic shock from twenty paces.”

“Many of Qud’s fungi are still quite toxic, though perhaps not to such exuberant levels. Largely it depends on which of those toxins are already present in the underlying environment. They merely process them into more readily degradable forms.”

“I know what mushrooms do, Agate,” said Mokou. There was still a grim implication in the needless lecture. The fungi around them were thick and tall as a forest of the old world. She sighed. “Guess there’s poison in the soil here, too.”

“Oh, yes,” Agate gave a bitter chuckle. “Another gift from the Eaters.”

Mokou had seen it happen countless times. Always from those assured they’d never live to see the full consequences they’d deferred. At least life  _ could _ still grow here. She didn’t want to dwell on it. “You get your fungus from one of these puffs?”

Agate gave a smile as cold as the light of her glowcrust. “This was a gift from Pax Klanq, one of the foremost physicists of our time and my water-kith. I doubt you’ve heard of him, he’s something of a recluse.”

She hadn’t heard of him, but she wasn’t about to give Agate the further satisfaction of admitting her ignorance. “Huh,” she said. “Where’s the bed you promised, anyway?”

Agate’s faint smile faded. She turned and skirted the broodpuff to continue up the wash. “Just a bit further.”


	20. Mehshruul End

They trod through more winds of the fungal canyons. Stars shone above them and the scarred moon rose to join its light to the stellar tapestry. The rock walls widened. The fungal trunks and shadowed trees took on a more orderly spacing. The aroma of pollen and fruit augmented the scent of spores on the night breeze. There was a sharper scent lurking beneath these — something distant and acidic.

It was unmistakeably an orchard, though many of the trees bore as many fungal outcroppings on their boughs as fruit. A warm light filtered beyond the rows of trees. As they approached, the light resolved into a lantern hung on the porch of a simple farmhouse. A figure sat in its glow on a wooden rocking chair, dressed in well-worn farmer’s garb: a long belted tunic, sandals, and a wide hat that blocked features from light.

“Evenin’, travelers,” the farmer called. “Peace and welcome to Mehshruul End.”

“Evening, good fellow,” Agate responded. “Have you spare beds for the night?”

“Aye, that we do.”

The closer the two of them drew to the farmhouse and its porch, the more details Mokou could discern. The farmer was a stocky sort, well-muscled despite his advancing age. Ruddy, lined cheeks and wild red sideburns shot through with streaks of grey. There was a pool of something opaque, dull and solid beneath his chair. The rockers had pressed two troughs through it. The same substance stained the wooden boards of the porch in haphazard drops across its width. Wax?

Agate halted at the foot of the porch. “As for compensation, I am equipped to service any machinery that may require it.”

“Could cook, too,” said Mokou. Agate glanced back at her as though she had momentarily forgotten her presence, but turned back to the farmer and nodded.

“You’re welcome to take a look at the stills in the morning, but don’t trouble yourself on our accounts.” The farmer gave a laugh that devolved into a few juicy coughs. “Y’get the Friend to Fungi discount!”

“Much obliged,” said Agate.

“We’ve got beds for travelers in the barn. I’ll show you the way.” The farmer grunted and rose from his chair. There was a sucking resistance to the motion. A wet crumbling sound, then the spattering of more wax through the slats of the chair to the floorboards. He stepped down to lead them around the farmhouse and as he turned his back to them the source became clear. Dangling down from his shoulders like a malformed cape was a fungal growth that drooped scalloped tiers of pale waxy bubbles from where it anchored to his flesh. As he walked, the growth dripped from vertical gashes left by the back slats of the rocking chair — the wax scallops had melted through and reformed around the wood, only to be disrupted once more when he stood.

Mokou felt lightheaded. She found herself fervently hoping that the Hourai Elixir was still enough to stave off a fungal infection of this caliber. She took a few breaths to steady herself, but it merely reminded her of how heavily the spores sat in the canyon farm’s night air.

“Mehshruul, right?” began Mokou. “You, uh — you get many visitors out here?”

“Not so many,” said the farmer, with a wet shrug. His pace was downright tranquil after a day spent following Agate. “And I ain’t Mehshruul. Mehshruul was my grandpappy. He built the place. Nan gave it his name after he passed.”

“After he… ended?” ventured Mokou.

Another hacking laugh from the farmer. “Ol’ Nan always was a kidder. He didn’t end, y’know! He’s still with us.” He proudly thumped the trunk of a tended fungus as they passed through the rows towards the darkened barn. “He’s in every tree and every shroom of this place.”

Mokou jogged forward a few paces to draw level with Agate. “Hey,” she hissed. “This place on the level? I ain’t picky about beds, but this has ‘warning!’ written all over it.”

Agate turned to fix Mokou with a cool regard. Her fungal growth glowed in the darkness. “There is nothing to fear here.”

Mokou was not reassured.

The barn was humble. Taut pig hides bridged the gaps between its dry planks. Despite the draftiness of its design, it seemed to be in good repair. The farmer kindled a lantern hung just inside the doorway. It painted shadows across darkened stalls and ladder rungs. Motes of dust and spores drifted from the rafters to the dirt floor.

“Beds are in the loft,” said the farmer. He turned to Agate. “Could bring one down for you, ma’am, but it might be a trifle small for you.”

“No need,” Agate said. Her ear flicked.

Mokou stepped further inside and poked her head past each of the stalls. “You got any animals for this barn?”

“We’re between ‘em at the moment,” the farmer grumbled. “Should have some more pigs by Uulu Ut. The lifeblood of our End’s always been in the trees, anyhow.”

Mokou grunted in acknowledgment. There was something unsettling about an empty barn even under the best of circumstances. “Sure you don’t want us to cook you anything tonight?”

“Don’t trouble yourselves, friends! Awful late for supper. Besides—” He looked back at the farmhouse and scratched his chin. “It’s best y’keep your eyes to yourselves.”

Mokou shot a glance back towards Agate. She hadn’t reacted in the slightest. Instead, she still seemed to be engrossed in checking each stall’s general state of upkeep. Mokou heaved a heavy breath.

“If’n that’s all you need, I’ll be turning in for the night.” The farmer tipped his hat to them. “Moon and sun, friends. Rest well.”

With that, he ambled back down the hill. Agate continued her inspection. Mokou leaned back against the ladder and crossed her arms while she waited for their host to leave earshot.

“Really?” She scoffed at last. “Empty barn, fungus everywhere, farmhouse we shouldn’t go near?”

“It’s simple self-preservation,” said Agate. She unfolded a tarp from her hoversled and laid it over the floor of the freshest stall. “We pose far more of a threat to these folk than they do to us. Not only is it trivial to simply mind one’s business, it is healthier for all involved parties.”

Mokou lifted a hand in exasperation. “I’m just saying, an atmosphere like this is how you get youkai!”

Agate sighed. “What are those?”

Mokou looked up into the shadowed rafters. She was tired enough from the day’s travels. Now Agate demanded an explanation from her that could bridge this cultural and historical divide. “Any number of things. Had ‘em back where I came from. Some of them were like people and some were like beasts. Some were like both, or like neither. Some were ghosts, but they were all supernatural. They could feed off of your spiritual energy when they weren’t the kind that’d just eat you outright. A youkai’s the kind of being that thrives off of fear.”

Agate unrolled a thick blanket and spread it over the tarp, then pulled out another blanket to drape over her hindquarters. She settled her lower body onto her bedding, then shut her eyes tightly and massaged her temples. “I highly doubt we have those,” she said.

“Pretty fuckin’ cocky to just write off the possibility wholesale,” Mokou scoffed.

“Mokou,” said Agate. “Where  _ I _ come from, Bey Lah, fear is cultivated via the lah plant and harvested as a staple crop. Through the convergence of a lah-heavy diet, a physiological predilection towards anxiety, and centuries of rigorously-maintained cultural isolation, the result is that the Hindren of Bey Lah are a people in  _ perpetual terror of all that surrounds them.” _

“Yeah, that’s how you get youkai! That’s exactly how!” Mokou furrowed her brow. “Wait, maybe you really  _ are _ a youkai if you eat fear too.”

“Cease your prattle and allow me to reach my point,” said Agate. “Qud holds innumerable reasons to justify my simple-minded kinfolk’s terror. Many of them I have witnessed personally in my travels. But in the decades I have spent in exile from Bey Lah’s stifling confines I have yet to encounter any being, any phenomenon, any event that defies a scientific explanation.”

Mokou made a disgusted noise into the back of her throat. It was almost precious how much this scientist thought she’d seen in a few paltry decades, how she felt it clearly justified such a vainglorious attitude. This conversation was exhausting.

“Can’t imagine why they kicked you out,” Mokou muttered. She turned and climbed the ladder to the loft to check her own sleeping arrangements. Three simple beds lay between sacks of meal and malt. One was silent host to a miniature forest of fungal bodies. The other two were in slightly better shape. She set down her pack and rummaged for rolling papers. “You’re not missing much in that stall of yours,” she called. “One of these is a fuckin’ fungal bed.”

“It might be the softest of them,” Agate replied.

Mokou found the pouch of herb Lulihart had sent her along with and tapped some into a paper along with a sprinkle of witchwood shavings. She sealed the roll and tucked it into the corner of her mouth. “Some things don’t  _ want _ to be explained, y’know,” she grunted as she hefted the bedding over her shoulder. Dust and spores billowed from it. She needed to take it outside to beat the rest out. “Explained, classified, any of that shit.”

She hopped down from the loft and softened her landing with a burst of flight. Agate watched her cross to the barn doors with an exasperated expression.

“Are you sleeping outside, then?” Agate asked.

“What, I gotta justify everything to you?” Mokou plucked the joint from her mouth and waved with her free hand. “Time for a li’l Fujiwara no Smokou.”

She slid open the barn door and stepped out into the night.


	21. Orchard

The stars had changed. Not overnight, but over millennia. Some of their graces endured. The great galactic river still flowed across the heavens. Time had revealed it a river in truth to her: stellar drops in its shifting bed had drifted or submerged or bubbled to the fore countless times. The constellations spanning its banks had shifted, mutated. Tenryu, the dragon king of heaven, slithered inexorably towards another north star, never satisfied with the feasts made of the last few.

In ages past the stars were joined by glimmering, gaudy pretenders. Some still danced beneath the stars, but their numbers dwindled bit by bit. Countless more had dimmed their lights in exhaustion, and now waited to return to the earth. Their fiery plummets characterized the skies of this age. The Spindle stood in silent relief of the wheeling stars’ light, a needle bridging earth and sky.

Mokou let out a plume of smoke to join the Spindle in shading out the stars. She had spread the dusted bedding down on a patch of grass between the orchard rows. She hadn’t had a night to look at the stars since Irula’s kitchen.

Stargazing and a midnight smoke — she used to have a wife to share in this. Keine. She shut her eyes tightly and took a deep breath. That was long ago, beneath a different sky, in a different land.

For the land had changed too. Mutated, like the sky. This strange farm and its fungal orchard was but a microcosm of what the world had become around her. But then, life was life, and where there was life, there was magic. She could sense its flow about her — not quite taste and not quite sight. A ghostly shimmer behind every starlit spore. The witchwood helped her senses. The flow was stronger here than in the desert. With the sense of its quantity came the knowledge, practiced to the point of instinct, of what she could do with it.

All mana strove for change. If left to its own devices, it would change as the life it stemmed from changed — subtly, gradually. The art behind magic was to direct that change to her own ends. She could weave a firestorm from the mana around her. She wouldn’t. She had no cause to. Changing life to fire was a transformation of radical violence. Nothing here in this fungal orchard lit by the broken moon moved her to that violence, yet.

Perhaps nothing here moved her at all. Perhaps that sort of deadened emotional cycle crested in time ahead of her to crash over her again. Perhaps it already had.

From a tree above and behind her came a rustling. Beneath that rustling, a shapeless, subtle whispering. She was no longer alone.

“Hey,” said Mokou. She punctuated her greeting with another plume of smoke.

“Moon and sun, traveler,” came the reply. There was a woman in that tree, or someone with a voice she’d read womanhood into. Florid, musical, almost enticing.

“You liking that tree?” asked Mokou. She couldn’t make out anything within the shadowed foliage.

“Yes,” said the voice. “Are you liking our bed, our orchard? Our sky?”

“It’s alright,” Mokou said. “Peaceful. I’m Mokou. You got a name, tree-friend?”

“Do I need one?” asked the voice in the tree. “I’m just another daughter of the canyons, and you’ll be gone come the morning.”

“Still nice to know who’s being hospitable to me for the night,” shrugged Mokou.

“Call me Seeqat,” said Seeqat. The whispering was a constant, breathless undercurrent to her voice.

“Live and drink, Seeqat,” said Mokou, trying the local address. There was something she had sensed on the breeze here that she found echoed in the local mana flow. “You got acid around here?”

The foliage rustled, and there was a plucking noise. “Try this! It’s de-spined,” said Seeqat, and a fruit seemed to launch itself from the leaves to Mokou’s surprised grasp.

It was an apple, or something like it. It was vaguely star-shaped, and felt firm and ripe in her grip. She took a bite of one of its five nodes and found it incredibly yet pleasantly tart. “Thanks!” she said. “Ain’t a bad apple.”

“There’s an acid weep in a little wash along the northern wall,” Seeqat explained. “It seeps down into the soil here and the apples grow so wonderfully sour.”

“Acid weep?” asked Mokou, between bites.

“A delicate thing,” said Seeqat. For a moment, the low whispers nearly chorused her. “Only where the spores take root can a weep grow. They draw their favorite fluids from the earth and make a source of them around themselves.” She giggled. “Never seen one? You must not be from here.”

“Nope. Still feeling things out.” Mokou finished the apple and her joint. She wasn’t in a particular hurry to get up, strange company notwithstanding. “There’s a lot I haven’t seen of Qud yet.”

“Well, best not look to me, then. For answers, or otherwise. I’ve rarely ventured beyond the canyons.”

“Lotta boars out there, huh,” said Mokou.

“Yes,” said Seeqat.

A star fell in silence above them, or perhaps another pretender. The breeze rustled the leaves.

“Seeqat, you’re from here,” began Mokou, breaking the silence. “What’s a water-kith?”

“Forward, aren’t you?” Seeqat giggled. “We’ve only just met. Do you like our apples that much too?”

“No, I mean—” Mokou sputtered briefly. “It’s something I heard Agate mention. I’d never heard of it. I’m not from here.”

“It’s a sacred bond formed between those who partake in the Water Ritual,” said Seeqat. “When someone touches your heart, moves you, when you would give your water to see them flourish and they would give back the same, that is cause for the Water Ritual. Then you share your water, and the words.”

“The words?” asked Mokou.

“Gracious, traveler Mokou,” said Seeqat. The whispers nearly crested into something like legibility. “Do you lead on every daughter like this? They’re weighty words. Best to just ask when you’ve found one you’d call kith.”

“Sure, sure,” Mokou waved. “Thanks for the explanation.”

Conversation paused once more. The night began to chill. Seeqat spoke next.

“Your companion is Agate, you said—” she began. There was a touch of trepidation in her tone. “That wouldn’t happen to be…  _ Agate Severance Star, _ would it?”

Mokou sighed. “Yeah, it’s her.”

“Oh!” Seeqat said. The foliage rustled with her excitement. “Oh, Moon and Star, to think she’d grace our little End! How did you come to be traveling with her?”

“Uh,” Mokou slid her hands beneath the back of her head in anticipation of rising, but stayed on her back. “She’s taking me to some geometric place. I’m trying to get east.”

“Do you mean  _ Kitchen Heptagon?” _ Seeqat gasped, and the whispers peaked again. Mokou could almost hear the stars in her eyes. “Oh, I’ve always dreamed to go. The sights, the smells, the cuisine, the chance to see the Carbide Chefs perform! Maybe even to see Chef Bajiko Ki…”

“It’s what, a theater?” asked Mokou.

“It’s a cooking arena! And a city beneath it! Across the flower fields, to the southeast. Sometimes my mouths bring me word of the matches. Oh, I envy you now, Mokou. You’ll have to tell me all about it.”

“If I pass through again, I’ll be sure to,” Mokou said. She wasn’t certain she would. The atmosphere was disagreeable. Then again, this conversation was going better than conversations with mysterious voices in the trees usually went. In Gensokyo, it usually meant something was about to attack you.

“One last question, friend,” said Seeqat. “How did you hear about us?”

“Mm?” Mokou grunted. She rose and gathered the bedding. “Dunno. Agate already knew you were here. You’d have to ask her.”

“She’s heard of us!” Seeqat sighed in wistful excitement. “This could put Mehshruul End on the map! I won’t keep you up further. Rest well, Mokou.”

“You too, Seeqat.” She slung the bedding over her shoulder once more and made her way back to the barn, leaving the trees behind her.


	22. In Which Mokou Looks

Downhill from the barn and a short way behind the farmhouse stood Mehshruul End’s stills. A wooden structure nearly the size of the barn but far more durable and well-frequented hid gleaming copper from the jealous elements. Cheesecloth stretched across the window frames let through the morning’s spore-dappled sunlight. Mokou poked at cauldrons and stir-paddles while Agate busied herself with inspecting the stills. The old farmer waited at the doorway with an air of repressed concern. Every once in a while a drip of wax spattered from his back to the hard-packed floor.

“I imagine it’s pretty easy to get yeasts around here,” said Mokou. Silence made her uneasy.

“Aye, the End provides,” the farmer nodded. “Always has. Always will, the good earth willing.”

“Mm,” Mokou grunted. ‘Always’ was an empty word on the farmer’s tongue. Most couldn’t know the weight it carried. She turned back to her browsing. Most of the cauldrons were empty and clean. One sat cooling atop a low oven. The scent of simmered apples and spices wafted out from under its lid. Mokou lifted the lid and peeked at the contents. It smelled wonderful. A few bubbles rose to the surface of the wash — evidence of ongoing fermentation. Below the bubbles was a noise so muffled and indistinct that Mokou could nearly convince herself she didn’t hear it: an eerily familiar whispering. “Nice wash,” she ventured.

“Thank’ee,” said the farmer, with a tone of guarded pride. “The blend’s proprietary, o’course, but what ties it all together is a little bit of sweet voice.”

“Guess you’re lucky to have Seeqat, then,” said Mokou, covering the cauldron once more.

The farmer’s expression darkened. “Now you keep your eyes off my young, traveler.”

“Mokou,” called Agate. “Assist me with this covering.”

Two pot stills of bulbous copper loomed at the far end of the room. Their lyne arms bent down into a boxy cabinet that stood between the stills. The cabinet was roughly a head taller than Mokou. Its joints were sealed in clay, while the face of it looked removable. This was the covering Agate indicated.

Mokou crossed over to her and lowered her voice. “Hey. The wash is whispering.”

Agate’s glance flicked back over her shoulder to the cauldron, then returned to Mokou. “Mumble mouth, I’d wager. Rather ingenious. Enzymes and yeasts in one ingredient.”

“What the hell is—”

“The covering,” Agate interrupted, gripping one side of the cabinet’s face. Mokou grunted and took the other side. They pulled it away and cool air washed over them. Inside the cabinet, copper coils from each still snaked down through a vertical terrarium of glowing mushrooms before emerging from spigots on each side. Each fungal cluster chilled the air around it in addition to the teal light it gave. Agate turned her attention to the coils.

“Those are… hoarshrooms?” asked Mokou.

_ “Rather _ ingenious,” Agate nodded. “Come and look at these condensers.”

“Your antlers are in the way.”

Agate took a small step to the side and tilted her head slightly out of the way. Mokou pressed in next to her to look over the copper tubes within the chilly confines of the condenser cabinet. They were clean and showed no signs of corrosion.

“They look fine?” said Mokou.

“Yes,” said Agate, her voice hushed conspiratorially. “More importantly — our host’s daughter. You met her?”

Mokou blinked, but kept her voice low in response. “Huh? Yeah. We had a chat last night before I came back in.”

“She spoke to you? She gave you her name?”

“Yeah. Is that—”

_ “Did you see her?” _

“What? No, she was in a tree.”

“Good,” said Agate. “Let us replace this covering and be on our way. The sooner I am upwind of you again, the better.”

“Oh, fuck off,” said Mokou. “You don’t need my help.” She turned to tell the farmer the good news of his still only to find the doorway empty. The sounds of hushed voices outside drifted in. It was too quiet for Mokou to understand, and difficult to say whether it was a conversation or an argument. Below it, even more subtly, came the whispers.

“I had hoped to avoid this,” Agate muttered behind her. The hindren slid the condenser cover back in place, then raised her voice to address Mokou. “Don’t look at her.”

“What?” Mokou glanced back to Agate. Agate kept her gaze squarely on the stills. The conversation outside ceased.

“Traveler Mokou? Ms. Star?” Seeqat’s lyrical voice sounded from the doorway. “I hoped to send you along with some boons for the road.”

“Really? Thanks,” said Mokou, turning back. She saw Seeqat. Her heart froze in its rhythm for an aching moment. A moment, to the world around her.

Nature or fate had seen fit to grace this humble fungus-ridden apple farm with the most beautiful woman in the world. Skin the color of dusk, hair of crimson tresses gathered under a sunhat, eyes whose playful shimmering pierced through Mokou like jade spearpoints. Just another daughter of the canyons, she had said — a daughter with features so regal she could have descended from the courts of paradise, a poise so elegant her simple sundress could have been the regalia of old empire.

Mokou’s heart pounded on, twice as fast. It was as though the weeks, the months it took her to nurture a seed of infatuation into full-grown connection had all been compressed into that single skipped beat. The rest of her body raced to catch up — blood to her face, butterflies to her gut, jelly to her bones, bliss to her brain. She knew these physiological markers, knew this feeling. This was love. This felt exactly like love.

“Oh dear!” Seeqat giggled. “You’ve gone and looked, haven’t you?” Her face lit up like the sun when she laughed and like the sun gazing at it would certainly sear her. The whispering fungal mouths that ran up the length of her left arm babbled out syllables to echo her gaiety. Were those mumble mouths? Mokou couldn’t help but think they accessorized her so well.

“Guh,” Mokou said.

Behind her, Agate groaned. “Ayvah,  _ why? _ Was it so hard to listen?”

Seeqat hefted the basket in her grasp. “There’s some fresh apples, a jar of preserves, and a bottle from our latest batch of cider.”

In the face of such dizzying generosity, Mokou’s speech struggled. Love almost never hit her this fast. “You— I— I—”

“If you like it, perhaps you could put in a good word at the Heptagon?” Seeqat smiled up at her and pressed the basket into her grasp. Hand brushed against hand. Mokou’s cheeks burned from the brief touch. Such an unearthly beauty, yet it was tempered, alloyed by the markers of daily labor — calloused fingers, the scent of apple blossoms.

“I would do  _ anything _ for you,” said Mokou. Tears beaded at her eyes.

Agate sighed loudly and backed herself into Mokou’s unheeded periphery. She turned her address, if not her regard, to Seeqat. “Is she bothering you?”

“It’s quite alright,” Seeqat waved off the concern. “This sort of thing is common when we get visitors. Might I ask — where did you hear of us?”

“The trash,” stated Agate.

“Hey!” Mokou whirled on Agate. She clenched her grip on the basket of goods. “Sure, it’s a little rustic, but that ain’t any kind of way to talk!”

“Now, now, Mokou,” said Seeqat, wrapping her hands placatively around Mokou’s arm. Even through the confines of the heavy suit, her touch eroded Mokou’s anger. Her name on Seeqat’s tongue was heavenly. “Do you recall where, specifically?”

“The discarded minutes of a Consortium of Phyta moot, I recall. The general thrust of discussion seemed to be lamenting fungal influence. Yours was among the farms mentioned. I filed the location away for reference,” said Agate.

“Ah,” said Seeqat. Sadness crept into her tone like a cloud over the sun. “The spores have been a part of our farm since well before my time. Is it so freshly lamentable?”

“Those of the Consortium tend to take the long view on many matters,” Agate said. “Yes, I recall precisely. I recovered the minutes two years and as many months ago. The moot itself took place some seventy years previous.”

How the hell did she remember something she found in the trash two years ago? Still, perhaps Mokou’s anger had been misplaced — after all, Agate hadn’t been the one throwing mention of Seeqat’s farm into the garbage in the first place.

“Are they making you sad, Seeqat?” asked Mokou. “I will burn their shitty little group to the ground.”

“You’d be at the task for some time,” said Agate, wryly. “They’re a rather decentralized and far-flung collection of flora.”

“I got nothing but time,” Mokou shrugged.

“Please, don’t make new enemies just for my sake,” Seeqat laughed and squeezed Mokou’s arm. It was bliss, to know she laughed because of Mokou. Just as it was agony to see her smile fade again. This was love, wasn’t it? “Still, if the Consortium laments our very existence, it’s no wonder we’ve been so isolated.”

“They’ve no particular fondness for me, either,” said Agate. “Such is politics, I fear.”

Seeqat released her grasp on Mokou’s arm and stepped back a few paces. She fretted a bit with her empty hands. “Even just a word at the Heptagon—”

Agate, unturning, reached to the side and plucked the jam jar from Mokou’s basket.

“Hey! Ask!” Mokou growled. Maybe her anger was properly placed after all.

Agate flicked her glance at Mokou, then rolled her eyes. She produced a spoon, popped open the jar, and sampled it. She nodded approvingly.

“You have an acid weep on the grounds, do you not?” the hindren asked.

“Yes! You could tell from just the taste?” Seeqat beamed. If a bit of validation from Agate could do that, then Mokou didn’t know what to do with her anger anymore. She was starting to get emotional whiplash. She shut her eyes and breathed. For a moment, afterimages of the apple farmer’s daughter shimmered in the darkness of her lids.

“It adds a certain dimension to the inherent tartness of starapple,” Agate continued. “You’ve drawn attention to it quite skillfully. For this alone, I would vouch for you. Might you shift away from the door? We should be on our way.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you ever so much, Ms. Star,” Seeqat effused. There was the sound of Agate’s hooves crunching upon the hard dirt floor, and the delicate noise of Seeqat shifting closer. The soft warmth of her touch over Mokou’s hands. Mokou opened her eyes. Seeqat smiled back at her. Dizzying.

“It was lovely to meet you, traveler Mokou,” said Seeqat. The warmth was genuine. So, too, was the touch of melancholy in her voice.

“I—” Mokou swallowed. “I could stick around, maybe?”

“You cannot,” Agate called from outside.

Seeqat giggled again. “Now, Mokou, how are you going to tell me about the Heptagon if you never go?”

“Right. Right.” She took a deep breath. It was strange and heady, how the ambient spores interlaced with the scent of the apple blossoms pinned to Seeqat’s hatband. She didn’t want to leave, but then, she didn’t belong here. But then, what had Seeqat told her last night? Mokou pulled a hand free of her grasp to fumble for a canteen. “Oh! Um, the words—”

A hue of heartbreaking contrition fell across Seeqat’s smile. Mokou stopped her fumbling. Seeqat lifted her hand between them, still holding Mokou’s hand which in turn held the basket of gifts. She turned the two of them until her back was to the stills, and Mokou’s to the door. “The ritual goes both ways, Mokou. If you still don’t know the words the next time you come by, maybe I’ll tell you.”

She pushed Mokou softly away, back into the morning sunlight of the canyons. “Live and drink, traveler.”

“Y-you too, Seeq,” said Mokou. She sniffed loudly and blinked away looming tears.

“It doesn’t shorten like that!” Seeqat laughed. “What if I called you Mok?”

Mokou gave a sad grin. It sounded awful. “You could call me whatever you want, Seeqat.”

Next to her, leaning against the still-shed, the old farmer cleared his throat heavily. “Best you be moving along, traveler.”

Mokou shot him a glare, then sighed. It probably wouldn’t do to punch her father. She turned away. Agate had already started up the canyon to the east. Mokou quickened her pace to catch up. At the treeline, she turned back again and waved.

“I’ll come back!” she shouted. “I promise!”

Seeqat waved back over the distance. The wave eventually turned into an exaggerated shooing motion. Mokou sighed wistfully and caught up to Agate again.

“A lofty promise for one who still aims for the Moon Stair,” said Agate. She spoke without turning.

“I really will,” said Mokou. She felt it, fervently. It was a good feeling. “Maybe we could come back after we tell the Heptagon about them? Hell, with the love of a good woman like that, who needs the Moon Stair?”

Agate took a slow breath. Her voice, when she spoke again, carried a dangerous tone. “Do you imagine me to be your personal escort service?”

Mokou jogged forward and tried to catch her gaze. “What? Then you can get back to the Stilt and start terrorizing people again or whatever.”

Agate shut her eyes tightly, then looked ahead once more. “That halfhearted approach is simply unacceptable. I will take you to the Heptagon. Nothing more.”

Mokou opened her mouth, but Agate suddenly turned her full, withering glare upon her. Again, the dangerous tone. “Choose your next words carefully. Better yet, do not speak. I am exhausted of you.”

Mokou lifted her hands in a gesture of placative incredulity. She paused in her stride until Agate swept forward again. If Kitchen Heptagon was where they’d part, it couldn’t come soon enough.


	23. Border of Flower Fields

The hermit was humming again. It wasn’t a lack of proficiency that so irked Agate. Mokou’s pitch was clear. The modal tones she gravitated towards were unfamiliar in a way that would have been otherwise intriguing. No, it was that Mokou seemed pathologically incapable of completing a musical phrase. Every time she approached a resolution, she simply trailed off, then switched to an entirely unrelated melody — or worse, picked it back up from the beginning.

Was this what love did to the besotted fool? It still rankled how blatantly Agate’s warning that morning had gone unheeded. It was a warning grounded in personal experience. She knew how it felt to be under an apple farmer’s daughter’s influence. It put her  _ off her form. _

“Love” was a tactical disadvantage.

If only Agate were at liberty to use her headphones, she wouldn’t be subjected to the incessant humming. But no, noise blockers were a luxury — and a necessity — reserved for the safety of civilization. Their day’s travel had deposited them at the border of the flower fields, a region of riotous growth and murky threats. Just beyond the break in the canyon walls, twisted foliage formed an amorphous wall that swallowed the horizon. This was Qud, now.  _ Anything _ could clamber out of the treeline in search of prey. Agate’s acute hearing was better turned towards listening for potential threats.

She didn’t trust Mokou to be able to identify any of those threats. Not under the best of circumstances — certainly not while lovesick.

So she would bear the humming while she pieced camp together. If all else failed, she could plug it up with dinner. By the time she had assembled the burner and unfolded a pair of tables, she realized Mokou hadn’t started a new phrase in over a minute.

“You got rabbits here?” asked Mokou. It was the first time she had spoken since the morning.

Agate looked back at her. She was seated on a small boulder, holding a starapple slice up to the early evening sky. The moon hung dimly there, risen early, still outdone in brilliance by the lingering salt sun. Propped on a smaller boulder next to Mokou was a platter that held the rest of the apple. She’d arched the slices down and partially peeled each one with a little decorative flourish to fashion it into some abstract beast.

“Rabbits?”

Mokou turned to Agate and popped the slice into her mouth. “Cute little buggers. Long ears, strong jumpers, fuzzy, good eating. Was trying to remember the last time I saw one. If you haven’t heard of ‘em, you probably don’t have ‘em.”

“Is this the subject of your plating?” asked Agate, stepping closer to inspect the platter.

“Yeah,” Mokou nodded, and gestured for Agate to help herself to a slice.

Agate considered herself a harsh judge of crudités. Despite this she could again find no fault in Mokou’s knifework. It was certainly a whimsical representation of a rabbit, yet she had replicated the design on each slice with an impressive uniformity. And even through the whimsy, the sculpture itself held some echo of the unfamiliar beast’s nature. “I have yet to encounter one of these in Qud,” said Agate.

“Well, look out if you start seeing them. They breed like crazy and can really disrupt a place’s plant cycle if there’s nothing to keep them in check. And that’s just the regular kind.”

The apple held the signature crisp tartness of Mehshruul End’s crop. It had ripened perfectly. While the farm’s amenities may have been lacking, its products more than made up for it. “A bit of hummus would elevate this,” said Agate.

“Oh, gimme a break, I just wanted to make a quick snack,” sighed Mokou.

Agate procured a jar of hummus from her hoversled and placed a dollop in the center of the slices. “Appetizers cannot be half-hearted.”

“I promise you it was already done. I promise you I put exactly as much effort as I wanted to into that.” Mokou dipped a slice into the hummus and scowled as she chewed. “Fuck you. Acting like you’re right just because it’s better. You don’t even know what rabbits are.”

“I’ve crossed paths with the occasional mutant adventurer who bears distant resemblance to these. But the beast itself? Never.”

“Ahhhh,” Mokou nodded. Her scowl flipped into a superior smile. “Then you’ve got the  _ other _ kind. The  _ youkai _ kind. We had ‘em back in Gensokyo, too. Only question is whether you’ve got earth rabbits or moon rabbits. Because if it’s moon rabbits? Whoof. You haven’t seen ‘invasive species’ until you’ve stared down the barrels of a Lunarian rifle brigade.”

Mokou punctuated her statement by scooping the bitten half of her slice through the hummus before finishing it. Agate stared in horror.

“What,” said Mokou. “I think if my tongue was gonna fall out it would have done that already, chief.”

“Glotrot is not my concern,” Agate rejoindered. “Medical science has still failed to identify the transmission vector for Moon King Fever. More fool me for expecting the barest hygiene etiquette from you.”

“Whatever that shit is, I don’t have it. You think I’m  _ making it up?” _ Mokou said, mockingly. “You just said you’ve met people who look like rabbits.”

“Yes, I have met  _ mutated people. _ You expect me to believe that you’ve fought a brigade of rabbits — explicitly supernatural rabbits — from the moon? Why not stay, if you’ve been?”

“No, I didn’t go. The moon comes to  _ you.” _ Mokou leaned back on her boulder and took a deep breath. “That was an old war, anyway.”

“How old?” asked Agate.

Mokou shot her a dull look. She gestured east, where the Spindle still gleamed in sunset’s livery. “Older than that’s been here.”

“And you fought in it,” said Agate, in flat disbelief. She had weathered many outlandish claims from self-aggrandizing fools hoping to curry her favor over the years, but those claims usually had some scrap of grounding in reality. This was in another caliber entirely.

Mokou simply laughed. “I can’t believe you, you know? You’re like ‘Youkai? No, we don’t have those.’ And then  _ literally the next morning _ I look at a woman and fall in love instantly. That’s… that’s the playbook! That’s such a classic youkai move!”

“The phenomenon of which is readily explicable by natural means,” Agate stated. “Whether a broad-spectrum reactive psionic enthrallment, or a remnant strain of Eater pheromone manipulation, or any number of other mundane hypotheses.”

“Oh, but god forbid it’s a spiritual hypothesis,” Mokou scoffed.

“All of which would be immaterial if you had simply  _ listened to me _ . Instead, you have needlessly hindered yourself, while expecting me to pick up your slackened vigilance. You were lucky she was conscious of her influence.”

“But she’s not a youkai!” Mokou flung her hands back in mock surprise.

Agate’s voice climbed in intensity. This was how her warnings were repaid. “You are lucky she let you  _ leave.” _

“Still not a youkai!” Mokou flung her hands up and back further, then scoffed. “You think I don’t know that? You think this is my first beguilement? I used to live by  _ Oth. _ This one is fine! I’m in love! It’s great!”

“How much do you even know about her?” Agate stepped back a pace. She knew her expression had soured into something cruel.

“Well, let’s see, she likes apples, she makes good jam, she knows how to brew. She has a whole bunch of fungus-mouths running up one arm. Maybe she’s a good kisser?”

“A woman is not defined solely by her fungus,” said Agate. “Do you honestly believe that’s sufficient ground for the basis and perpetuation of a dedicated relationship?”

“I’ve had worse starts,” Mokou laughed. It sounded bitter, but there was a manic heedlessness to it. “And who says I’m even expecting that? Even if nothing comes of it, that’s fine! I’ll just vibe with it while it lasts!”

“And for that duration, you are  _ vulnerable.” _ Agate pinched the bridge of her nose, then matched her gaze to Mokou. “This love you feel is an emotional compromise. Emotional compromises are tactical compromises.”

Mokou slapped her hands against her thighs and stood. She looked down from atop the boulder. “Good news!” she said. “I’m not your problem anymore. You are  _ absolved. _ I’ll find the Heptagon myself.”

“This is pathetic,” said Agate. She crossed her arms to control her racing pulse.

“You’re right about that,” said Mokou. “That thing you just said was about the saddest thing I’ve heard anyone say. Get some help.”

“You’re one to talk,” Agate scoffed. “You don’t have the slightest idea of what’s ahead of you.”

“I’ll figure it out,” said Mokou. She shouldered her pack and the carbine — the carbine Agate had made her. As she adjusted her load’s distribution, she raised her voice one last time. “You think I don’t know this is an illusion? You think something has to be  _ real _ to have an effect on the world? Fuck you! I’m finally  _ feeling  _ something!”

Mokou kicked off the boulder and drifted up into the evening air, slowly picking up speed. As she crested the treeline, she spun around to yell a few parting words.

_ “And this suit sucks to fly in, by the way!” _

Then she was over the trees and gone, a bone-white speck swallowed by the shadowed sky.


	24. Phoenix Pyre

Agate didn’t  _ feel _ absolved. She felt more agitated than ever. What she had done was put an automatic weapon into the hands of a Moon King and let her fly off, unsupervised. Where was absolution in that? 

She didn’t relish the prospect of recounting how her favor fared to Irula. She relished even less the possibilities branching out from Mokou’s sudden departure. There was no singular worst-case scenario to dominate her anxieties. She had seen far too many in her decades of travel through the flower fields. There was only a chaotic jumble of what-ifs jockeying for primacy, each uniquely and incomparably disastrous.

What if the poor fool disturbed a nest of life saps? What if a spatial rift bubbled up from beneath and disgorged a decarbonizer in her path? What if she chose the wrong tree to shelter under and a mimic choked the life from her? In isolation, each scenario was unlikely, but the longer one spent in the wild glades of western Qud, the more any one of them became inevitable.

Of course, it wasn’t just about Mokou. The flower fields were not solely populated by hostile flora, fauna, and robotica. People lived there.  _ Her _ people. Bey Lah’s borders had opened several years ago, and shortly afterward the Hindriarch had issued a blanket amnesty to its exiles. Though the law no longer held Agate from the cervidian grove, the hearts of her people were slow to change. Many of those who had exiled her in the first place still lived. The current Hindriarch worked to untangle those knots of old prejudice, but it was slow and delicate work. The last thing they needed was for a volatile Moon King to blunder her way into their midst.

Agate took small solace that this was perhaps the least likely scenario. Bey Lah was well out of anyone’s way, many parasangs distant. But Bey Lah was not the only settlement in the wilds, and hindren were not the only peaceful folk that Mokou’s firepower might threaten, intentionally or no.

In truth, she was not tired. She had chosen this camp more for the benefit of her erstwhile companion. It stood in a state of liminal half-readiness, poised to resolve in either direction. If she finished the camp’s setup, her mind would happily burn through the rest of her energy conjuring more hypothetical grisly encounters. Her experience and expertise let her build a probability grid to apply to the flower fields’ violent ecology, but the movements of a Moon King never cleaved to grids.

It was not twenty minutes later, as she stowed the burner, that she heard it. A harsh series of cracks in such rapid succession that it could have been one tremendous noise. Each was somewhere between a gunshot and a branch splintering. As the initial cracks echoed off the canyon walls around her, the rustles and groans of distant treefall followed. From the sound of it, the point of origin was less than a parasang to the southeast. Squarely along Mokou’s last sighted heading.

Agate cursed. She secured her hoversled’s load, checked her pistols and grenades, then stepped past the shadowy treeline.

Only one thing in the flower fields could produce a sound like that: the tumbling pod of a feral lah. How many individual pods had burst at once to make such a report? Ten? Twelve? It would take either a small grove of feral lah or one prodigiously active bloom to chain that many pods together. Most likely she would find the lah before she found the blast site.

It was almost a relief to know it was  _ merely _ lah. She knew lah. They were uncomplicated, predictable. Familiar. Just as much a denizen of these verdant meadows and tangled thickets as she was. She did not allow her familiarity to bleed into complacency.

She heard no more pods bursting as she slipped through the trees. Other noises had risen in unrelated directions: the yowl of a puma, the chittering of bats, the cry of a boar. Natural sounds of the life around her. This was her element.

As light faded, the breeze shifted, blowing against her to the northwest. It was a fortuitous direction. She smelled the lah grove well before its rooted denizens could detect her. It was an unmistakable bouquet — strangers to the flower fields might well mistake it as stemming from some overworked animal. By the concentration, there were at least three clustered together somewhere ahead.

While she had the luxury of stealth, she beckoned her hoversled. By the light of her glowcrust, she found the tool she needed. She slipped her arms through the straps to heft the chrome fuel tanks across her back, then sparked the pilot flame at the tip of the nozzle. The flamethrower was a touch more cumbersome than her laser pistols, but the encumbrance simply encouraged her to act with deliberation.

She kept her approach to the humus and bracken when she could — anything to soften and absorb the weight of her steps. The trees shielded her from the lahblooms’ crude photoreceptors, but they relied far more on vibrations picked up by their roots to track their prey. She could hear them now. Petals flapping in the breeze, rhizome bundles creaking under tension. The instant the feral lah sensed her, they would eject those rhizomes to come tumbling after her, primed to burst and propagate more lah. Easy enough to outpace, even weighed down by her flamethrower.

She wouldn’t give them the opportunity. She tilted the nozzle just so. She squeezed the trigger. Gouts of flame rushed forth. Their dripping arcs slid expertly past trunks of witchwood and dogthorn to splash down at full force amidst the blooms in their clearing. The rhizome bundles sheltered by the flabby petals cooked off in the sudden heat, shredding their host blooms in eruptions of thorns. Even with intervening distance and vegetation, a few thorns whizzed angrily past her or bounced from her nanoweave coat. After the machine-gun cracks of the detonating pods, all that remained were the crackling of flames and the squealing of moisture pockets falling to the pyre.

Agate primed a freeze grenade and tossed it into the trees along the path of flames. The fire in the clearing was at little risk of spreading, but several trees between her and the clearing had caught as well. There was no sense in starting a forest fire over a few overeager lah. Despite her best efforts, flamethrowers were not precision implements. Frost would compensate. The grenade burst and smothered the flames.

In another week, assuming some rhizomatic traces survived her flames, there would assuredly be new blooms surfacing from the ashes. Lah cared not whether it grew from hindren or kendren, beast or lah. For now, the smoke would discourage other scavengers. She skirted the clearing. Past the smoke, the breeze carried the scent of sap and shredded wood from the southeast. The blast site was close. Mokou must have flown right over the lah grove.

All Agate could hear ahead was the sound of running water. No other scavengers had reached it yet. She unslung her flamethrower and returned it to the sled, then pulled free her blade and a pistol. It paid to stay armed. She picked her way forward through the shadowed trees.

There came a break in the foliage, a fresh pocket in the shifting tapestry of growth in the flower fields. She stepped into the thorn-strewn clearing. Old trees had toppled outward, while saplings and scrub had disintegrated under the barrage. The air was redolent in the scents of spice, sap, and blood. A hulking shape lay to the left of her, offset from the epicenter. It had shielded the lower trunks behind it with its mass, but the leaves and branches had been blasted off. Directly ahead, moonlight glinted subtly from scratched metal. Further beyond, at the far edge of the blast, a stream flowed. She kindled her hoversled’s lantern.

The shape to her left was a boar — a slugsnout, judging from what remained of its head. Thick blood pooled beneath it from scores of grievous and fatal wounds. Even its thick hide could not withstand so many tumbling pods. From its final angle, its attention had been elsewhere.

The glinting metal was her carbine. The cartridge was spent. Dozens of thorns had scored the finish from its body in several places. It would need repair. The blasts had knocked it from the hands of its wielder.

Those hands — and the wielder herself — were beyond repair.

Agate turned her head and shut her eyes. She took a slow breath. Another fool fed the lah. It was a common enough sight, but one could never fully inure to it.

Even as she marshalled herself, her analytical senses crept to the fore. There was much she could salvage from this grisly tableau. Not simply the gear and the meat, but the forensic knowledge as well. The least she could do for this poor fool’s memory was piece together her final moments. Agate fished a pair of gloves from a saddle pouch and donned them. The elastyne snapped to her wrist and the extra mechanical thumbs flexed in readiness.

She approached Mokou’s corpse and knelt for inspection. Her body lay slumped back against the remains of a witchwood tree. The posture suggested she had braced herself against it for support. Were it not for the stillsuit and the cushion of bloodstained hair between her and the trunk, she would have been unrecognizable. The stillsuit had strived valiantly against the pods — thorns peppered its every exposed surface, embedded in the plastifer. While the reinforced panels held true, the sheer volume of the little flechettes ensured that some had found points to burrow through. Internals were surely compromised. That much was clear from the dilute blood pool beneath her.

Perhaps her next stillsuit design would include a helmet.

Water hadn’t leaked just from the suit’s punctured reservoirs. The canteen strapped to Mokou’s chest was riddled with holes. None that couldn’t be patched, but it had already leaked itself dry. Agate pulled the body forward. Mokou’s pack had fared better than the rest of her, shielded as it was by the suit and her body. That was a bit of good fortune. She set it to the side with the carbine and the canteen, then began to ease the suit free.

The wounds beneath traced a deeper equation in the calculus of slaughter. What sort of fool let  _ that many _ tumbling pods build up in pursuit? From the air, she could have picked them off at leisure. She hadn’t. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed them at all. The slugsnout had ambushed her and brought her down from the skies. She had turned her carbine on the offending beast and shot herself dry just in time for a baker’s dozen of lah pods to roll squealing from the trees and erupt in rhizomatic exuberance on the both of them.

As she worked she found herself possessed of a morbid sort of resignation. This was a needless death. A senseless death. Certainly, she had known more agreeable companions on her travels, but it was painful that it had come to this. Almost insulting. It hadn’t been an hour since she had seen her last, swaddled up in obstinate superstition. Given everything Agate had left her with, given the terrible power she had unveiled in the desert, given all of these means — this should not have killed her. Mokou should not have allowed this situation to escalate into a fatal one. This was purely a death from inattention.

But then, wasn’t this inevitable? Such was the fate of Moon King Fever: delusions of grandeur followed by a “glorious feat”-induced death. Where was the glory in this ignominious end? Perhaps greater Qud was lucky that all this one had taken with her was a boar and some trees.

The largest reservoirs along the suit’s back were still intact. The same could not be said for the rest. She folded the stillsuit bulkily and set it next to the rest of the scavenged goods. She laid Mokou’s body out in the heart of the clearing. The pose gave her a dignity she’d been robbed of in death. What sort of customs did Mokou’s people hold for the dead, off across the Moghra’yi? Would she have hoped to be buried? Burned? Left to the glowcrows? There was no way to know. More sentimentality erased with her consciousness.

She would feed the lah, now.

Agate strode to the slugsnout. There was good meat she could coax from its scarred form. So, too, was there undiluted blood. Blood was power. She readied a fresh canteen and a vibrodagger and set herself to butchery. She had nearly coaxed the thing’s hide free when something crackled behind her. It was the sound of embers kindling into muffled flame.

She turned.

Mokou’s body erupted in a pyre the heights of which licked taller than the trees that yet stood. Agate stepped back a pace and flung up her arms to shield herself from the heat. Through the flames she witnessed the impossible. Flesh knit from ruin into wholeness. Beneath the furnace roar came the gasp of life returning to a reborn frame. The flames above collapsed in on themselves and came pouring back down like a cataract of the northern Svy. Mokou’s body shuddered as the fire flowed into her.

Then the flames were gone, leaving only smoldering patches of thorn-studded undergrowth to wreathe a body, perfect, unblemished, smoking. Mokou sat up. She coughed.

She turned her sullen, smoke-reddened gaze to Agate. “Fuck’s sake,” she croaked.

Agate’s mind raced for an explanation. There were those whose genomes responded to physical trauma with such speed that they could grow back even a severed head in moments. There were those whose psyches scried the near future to skirt around death. Those gifts required that the spark of life had not yet been snuffed. She had heard of recoming nooks, where minds preserved in the thin world could weave a new body around themselves. Those required all the apocryphal techniques and facilities of the Eaters.

This was something else. Moon King Fever didn’t do  _ this. _

“How?” Agate breathed.

Mokou made a gagging face and silently worked the muscles of her jaw and throat. She spat out a few charred thorns, then took a breath. “A pig shot me.”

“No, how did you—?”

Mokou sighed. She gestured to herself, hands before her bare chest, fingers splayed in plaintive rigidity. “You gonna fucking listen this time?  _ I can’t die.” _

Agate opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again and pointed in rhetorical emphasis. “That is flagrantly untrue. You were dead.  _ Pulped.  _ You had fully and completely expired. How did you — come back?”

“Oh my GOD,” Mokou groaned. She slumped back onto the ground, letting her arms fall to either side. “I can’t die in a way that sticks! Are you fucking happy?”

“How?”

Mokou squeezed her eyes shut. “Drank something I shouldn’t have! It’s a long fucking story! Where’s my goddamn gun?”

“Your gun is damaged. As is your suit.” Agate took a few breaths in an attempt to still her racing heart. “I can repair them. I… would like to hear this story.”

Mokou, still on her back, opened her eyes. She turned her gaze down to fix Agate with an impassive stare. Agate stared back in silence.

Mokou looked to the sky, sighed, and sat up again. “Where’s your soap?”

Agate retrieved her soap from the hoversled. She tossed the wax-paper-wrapped brick to Mokou, who caught it. Mokou stood with a soft groan and rolled her neck from side to side. Her expression was dull and distant. Tired. Agate was beginning to feel tired herself.

“How many times has this happened?” asked Agate, with as much gentleness as she could muster.

“Lost count,” said Mokou.

“How long has this been happening to you?”

Mokou blinked slowly. “Lost count,” she said. It was not that her expression was merely tired. It was something far deeper. It was as though the dullness held back an incalculable, astronomical weariness. She turned away, towards the stream in the darkness. “Start the rice. You know how to make curry?”

Mokou’s question did not seem born of any doubt of Agate’s culinary knowledge. From her tone it seemed rooted instead in utter disregard. This was its own sort of insult. “Who do you take me for?” Agate replied.

“Good,” was all Mokou said in reply. Beneath the disregard, there had been an unplaceable desperation. She sounded lost. Mokou stepped from the blasted clearing, out of the circle of lantern light.

Agate suppressed a shiver. Was this the gravity Lulihart had warned her of?


	25. Bath and Curry

The water flowed around her. She floated on her back and looked at the stars through the broken foliage. Light from the camp flickered on the leaves above her. The stream was a pleasant temperature, and the trees kept in just enough of the day’s heat. Animal cries sounded in the darkness, punctuated by the occasional distant crack.

She could almost fool herself into believing it to be a summer night’s dip in her old home. But it wasn’t bamboo overhead, it was the oil-slick iridescence of a mutant canopy. And the water that buoyed her was closer to brine. And summer was another memory, lost to the world that was.

Her hair fluttered around her, teased into a cloud by the slow current. How much blood and grime had the stream washed free from her? It was a relief, but at the same time, it almost felt like she was just replacing that grime with salt. She was probably as clean as she was going to get. At this point she was stalling.

It had been a while since she had last been  _ pulped. _ She didn’t know what the little rolling bastards that did that to her were. Judging by the sounds around her, this forest was rotten with them. Maybe she could burn away the next few she saw. Maybe that would just pepper her with  _ burning _ shrapnel.

Death had taken love from her, too. Usually she had more than a day to enjoy it. Usually it wasn’t  _ her _ death that did it. This time around she couldn’t muster anything stronger than an aching sort of emptiness about it.

She needed a smoke.

The breeze shifted, sending a brief chill over her bare skin. Something glinted in the waving branches above her. Mokou stood and let the water sluice from her body. She kicked off the streambed and rose into the canopy, keeping her eyes on the glinting thing. Drawing level, she found it to be her sunglasses. There was blood on them, but they were otherwise, somehow, intact. What were they  _ made _ from? She wiped off the stain and put them back on.

Mokou touched down at the edge of the clearing and stood there for a time, wringing salt water from her hair. Her long bath had given Agate ample time to set up the camp, this time to completion. The hindren had used that time to raise the kitchen, to position a pair of fallen logs near the campfire, and to finish butchering the boar-thing. Various pork cuts smoked over the campfire while Agate tended to a saucepot over her burner.

“What’s in that curry?” Mokou called. It smelled delicious. She’d been hungry even before her resurrection.

“Thus far, lah petals and elder flamebeard gland paste. The roux is from one of my instant bricks,” Agate replied, then looked up. There was something new in her regard — a sort of barely-restrained curiosity. As though Mokou was now some problem to be solved. The shift had come with Mokou’s latest resurrection. It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as Mokou had hoped. But then, many things weren’t, lately.

“Get some oil going,” said Mokou. “I’m gonna fry up some of this pork.”

She stepped gingerly across the thorn-studded ground to her pack. She had built up some respectable calluses from the last few days of travel. Those were gone, now. She fished out a ribbon of fabric from her pack to tie her hair back. As she gathered her hair behind her, she wove a delicate heat spell through it to dry it the rest of the way. Wisps of steam and flakes of glimmering salt rose from its length. As the spell ran its course, she found herself looking, with a morbid sort of bemusement, at the witchwood stump where she’d died. Thorns had stenciled a rough Mokou-shaped silhouette into the bark. The scents of curry and smoking meat couldn’t quite mask the smell of blood and wood-spice.

She donned her pants and slipped on her suspenders loosely. They were thankfully untouched. She couldn’t say the same for her boots — they had suffered in the blast. She tapped them out at the base of the trunk. Thorns and a small cloud of ash fell out. She fished around inside them to work free any embedded thorns. Her hand came out smeared in ash. How much of her meat had stuck in there when Agate pulled her boots free? She wiped off her hand on her pants and put her boots back on. The soles were a bit shredded, but it was better than nothing.

She wandered over to the kitchen area and started looking through the meat cuts. “You ever had tonkatsu curry?” she asked Agate.

“If so, then not by that name,” said Agate. “What sort of preparation is it?”

“You get a nice cut of loin,” said Mokou, picking out a pair of chops. “You bread it, fry it, serve it on a bed of curry and rice. You’ve got yourself tonkatsu curry.”

“I see the appeal,” Agate mused. She paused in her curry-tending to set up a breading station for Mokou. “Where does it hail from?”

Mokou shrugged. “The curry came from one place, the fried pork came from another place, then the place I’m from put it all together. None of those places are around anymore. Guess the food still is, though.”

“What happened to those places?” asked Agate.

“What happens to any country?” answered Mokou. “It falls apart, it turns into something else. Maybe someone comes and wrecks it, maybe it wrecks itself. Maybe people still live there. Maybe they can’t anymore. I don’t know. I didn’t keep track. Been too long to keep track.”

She dredged the loin slices in flour, dipped them in egg, repeated. She coated them in the breadcrumbs.

“I must ask again,” said Agate. “How long has it been? How old are you?”

Mokou turned the most sickly-sweet smile she could manage towards the scientist. A breaded cutlet dangled over the hot oil by her clasped chopsticks. “Did you know I spent a couple thousand years stuck in a glacier? It really fucks with your sense of time.”

A growing concern shot through with awe welled up in Agate’s piercing gaze. “You lived through the last ice age?”

Mokou barked out a short laugh. “If you call it living.” She dropped the cutlet into the oil. It sizzled violently. She picked up the next one.

Agate opened her mouth, then paused. Her gaze flicked in a circuit from Mokou’s face, to her bare chest, to the frying wok, then back. “Was your top damaged by the lah pods?”

“No,” said Mokou. “I’m air-drying.”

A dubious look started to edge out the awe in Agate’s gaze. “You’ll be air-frying shortly.”

“Gimme a break. This body’s barely been lived in.” Mokou dropped in the other cutlet. A few drops of oil splashed back on her. “Ow, fuck. My tit.”

Agate sighed. “And what of before the ice age?”

“What, how long? I really couldn’t tell you.” Mokou prodded idly at the frying chops. “I’ve had days that feel like months and years that feel like centuries. I’ve had centuries that feel like nightmares. I’ve had millennia that feel a way I can’t put into any word you’d know because I don’t know any language with words for what a millenium feels like. Maybe Lunarian has ‘em.”

A faint tic played through Agate’s expression. “Do you speak… Lunarian?”

“I know a word or two, but that ain’t speaking,” said Mokou. She flipped the cutlets in the oil bath. “Proper Lunarians don’t teach that kind of thing to us lowly folk. Kaguya taught me a few because she thought it was funny.”

“You’re an Eater,” Agate stated. The awe returned.

“Guess so,” said Mokou. She couldn’t feel any connection to the title. It felt like it only applied from a technicality. The people Agate considered Eaters were a blip in the timeline.

“What did you drink that let you outlive their age?” asked Agate.

“You ever heard of the Hourai Elixir?” Mokou responded.

“Never,” said Agate.

Mokou sucked air through her teeth. The fewer people who knew the specifics, the better. If even someone as evidently learned as Agate was ignorant of it, then the elixir was still almost certainly a secret to this land. Of course, now it just meant she had to explain what it was to someone lacking in any context whatsoever towards it.

“Katsu’s done,” Mokou said instead. She fished the cutlets from the oil, drained off the excess, and laid them on a cutting board. “Serve us up something to put ‘em on, will you?”

Agate plated portions of rice and curry onto a pair of her camp dishes. Mokou sliced the cutlets into strips and fanned them out over the curry. Before they settled down to eat, Mokou retrieved the bottle of cider from her pack. She muttered a quick prayer of thanks that it had survived. Agate produced a pair of solid glasses. Mokou poured some for Agate and ignored the second glass, keeping the bottle for herself.

They sat. They ate. Perhaps the ingredients were different than those familiar to Mokou. Familiarity was another memory. What she had in front of her was delicious. For tonight, she could wash down bites of ravishingly hot curry with sour cider. Maybe that was enough.

“This cider, though,” Mokou shut her eyes and breathed in slowly, appreciatively.

“I must agree,” said Agate. “Though perhaps your feelings are skewing your experience of it even further.”

Mokou waved her off irritably. “No, whatever that was with Seeqat, it didn’t make it through dying. It was like… all the feeling, but none of the calories. Love Lite.”

“What?” asked Agate. “Is this in reference to something?”

Some old advertisement, most likely. It was horrible, how they clung to you. “A health food jingle, I think.”

Agate frowned. “Calories are an integral part of health. Why wouldn’t you want them? What sort of gross culinary distortion is this?”

“No, I know, it was an awful trend. Forget I said anything. Some things should stay dead.”

“Very well. Then despite circumstances, Mehshruul End still garners your endorsement?”

“I’d say so,” Mokou nodded. “The food’s good, and it’s not like Seeqat meant anything by it.”

“Regardless of her intent, I did warn you—”

Mokou held up her hand to pre-empt the lecture. “You wanna hear about the Hourai Elixir or not?”

Agate sighed, but held her peace. It was a small relief. It gave them the opportunity to finish the meal. Not only that, but it gave the cider time to loosen Mokou’s tongue. It had been  _ far _ too long since she’d had a good cider.

“Alright,” said Mokou at last. She rolled herself a smoke as she began her recounting. “So way back when,  _ way _ back when, two gals in the Lunar Capital get an idea. They’re gonna make an elixir. Houraisan Kaguya, with her eternity manipulation powers, and Yagokoro Eirin, with her medicinal knowledge, they figure—”

“What do you mean, eternity manipulation powers?” cut in Agate.

Mokou wrinkled her brow. “I mean powers to manipulate eternity. What, you think I know how it works?”

“Very well, continue.”

“So they put their heads together and they make the Hourai Elixir. It’s one of those immortality drugs, you know? But it’s in another class entirely. It doesn’t just make you immortal, it makes you  _ eternal.” _

“You say ‘eternal’ as though its meaning is self-evident from your usage,” said Agate.

Mokou sighed. “What’s not clicking?”

“It is woefully imprecise. What does it mean to be eternal?”

“It means,” Mokou took a deep breath and leaned back, “you outlast precision. You outlast everything. You are self-perpetuating. You come back from anything. You don’t age. You don’t even think about it, the elixir does it all for you. You can’t turn it off if you try.”

The firelight flickered over Agate’s face, cut by the teal glow of her fungus. Her expression was calculating, haunted. Not entirely unsympathetic. Perhaps she was forming an academic grasp of Mokou’s condition. Academics would only get her so far.

“How did this elixir make its way into your hands?” Agate asked at last.

“Mm,” Mokou grunted. She pulled what she could from the last of her smoke, then tossed the butt into the fire. “That’s a story for another night.”

“As you like,” said Agate. She couldn’t quite keep the disappointment from her voice. “You should rest. I will repair what I can during my watch.”

“Sure,” said Mokou. “Thanks for the meal.”


End file.
